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Re: Oil News
didn't get the memo from forbes!Originally posted by Mega View Post
Well, so much for a future of $200 oil
August 7, 2008 (Forbes)
With new production coming on-line, crude could be in double-digits soon
Oil prices fell below $120 a barrel this week, touching levels last seen in May, as investors began to rethink the idea that crude is on an inevitable march to $200. -
Re: Oil News
Yes, and when we resume the climb towards $200 oil (soon) then $#* will suddenly become profoundly amnesiac that he's ever consumed 50 miles of web page space in endless dissection of the subtle, financially derived steaming innards of the "petroleum bubble's" pop. Either that or he'll just fade on out of here like GORDO did after his $50,000 (short of oil) options bet (strike price $70) turned into mouldy curdled cottage cheese on him (just a few weeks) after he placed it. Never in the annals of foolish gamblers being parted with large chunks of their money has anyone done as little fundamental research as did GORDO prior to placing that flying dutchman's bet. I really wanted to hit him up for a $50K loan so I could go play some poker with the money but he never stuck around long enough for me to ask.
$#* will either fold and slip quietly away when oil resumes it's steep climb, or stay on here and "change the subject". My bet is he stays, and "changes the subject".Comment
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Re: Oil News
The problem with the incessant carping about Peak Oil, or Peak Cheap Oil, or whatever is that there isn't a strong differentiation being made between a price action caused by supply issues as opposed to a price action caused by a denomination issue. Or possibly a price action due to herd investment behavior.
Sure, there is this argument that oil as energy contributes to pricing on almost everything, but this contribution varies significantly.
If oil prices are truly due to supply issues, then there should be significantly different behavior being seen in different commodities. But that isn't happening; commodities in general seem to be following very similar paths.
Of course in real life nothing works in isolation.
But to carp about $200 oil coming is stupid behavior of the highest sort.
$200 oil can arise out of many factors - not just supply, but inflation, war, dollar depreciation, sector rotation, and so forth.
Continuously pushing this threshold as some sort of indication of wisdom is like saying any object in the atmosphere will eventually come to earth - there are many reasons for this to happen but not necessarily the one you espouse.Comment
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Re: Oil News
The faith of metalman and Lukester is strong ... Really ... so many hopes from a piece in Telegraph???? What's next ? Analyses based on video clips from Teletubbies?Originally posted by metalman View Post
But. just to play along: an eye for an eye ... a Telegraph for a Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/m.../08/do0801.xml
The great oil bubble has burst
Bad news from the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline - an installation that may not normally draw much of your attention, but which is a throbbing artery of global energy supply, carrying vital oil supplies from Central Asia towards a tanker terminal on the Turkish coast. On some remote, sun-baked plain of Anatolia, an explosion sparked a fire earlier this week, temporarily cutting the flow through the pipeline.
But guess what? Here's the good news: the oil price did not zoom upwards in response, not a blip, barely a flicker. Actually the price of a barrel of crude has been falling: from a peak of $145 in early July, it came down to $117 and was trading yesterday at $120. That's almost a 20 per cent drop in little more than three weeks.
[...]
Just possibly, it means that what investors refer to in shorthand as the great "oil up" story has finally revealed itself not as the fundamental reflection of scarce supply that its adherents liked to claim, but as a simple, speculative bubble that was always going to burst.
The market's conviction that oil prices were set on an unstoppable upswing was underpinned by a set of mantras to be chanted daily before breakfast by anyone hoping to make money by following the crowd: insatiable demand from China; indolent Opec sheikhs unwilling to open the supply taps; that nasty Vladimir Putin playing political hardball with Russia's oil and gas resources; those mad Iranian mullahs hell-bent on nuclear conflict; and beyond all these, the looming threat of "peak oil", the inevitable moment when Mother Earth's carbon-fuel gauge starts pointing towards empty.
One way or another, said the fundamentalists, the only destination for oil prices in the medium term was somewhere north of $200 a barrel. And hooray to that, chorused the green lobby, because it may be the only thing that will ever make us wake up to the need to stop cooking the planet with carbon emissions.Maybe he was talking about the price for a couple of barrels of oil ...Originally posted by c1ue View Post
Last edited by Supercilious; August 08, 2008, 01:45 PM.Comment
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Re: Oil News
Originally posted by metalman View Post
History will repeat itself.
After the election is over, or if oil falls below $90, Saudi Arabia will reduce supply and send it soaring again. It happened in 2006, it will happen again.
There's no demand or supply, there's only the house of Saud controlling the price at their whims.Comment
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Re: Oil News
Touchring -
With respect, I can't say I agree. The big underlying story of the past three or four years is that even the house of Saud is within a whisker of losing control over the oil price. A decade ago they were a swing producer for the world with enough spare capacity to "decide" the oil price. Today, a lot of extremely reputable people [ Henry Groppe, Charley Maxell, and many others ] are pointing out that Saudi Aramco has well and truly lost the size of spare capacity sufficient to be the "decider" of oil prices. Right now, during a freefall oil price correction, the Saudis can "decide" when to step in somewhat. But they are not remotely capable of putting a damper on runaway oil prices in the event of hostilities in the Gulf today comparably to what they did at the outbreak of Gulf War I.
In previous decades, the resolution of crisis spiked petroleum markets was a political manoeuver. It could be resolved politically, by persuading one or another producer to open their spigots further. That is no longer an option during a future geopolitically driven crisis spike in the oil price. This is a massive sea change for the entire world, which proponents of "Peak Oil is bunk" are merely dancing around, in an exercise of considerable frivolity.
We've had this discussion, in considerable detail, and with people like GRG55 and EJ coming in and clarifying the bottom line, many months ago. To now roll this discussion right back to square one and render it a free-for all where people post claiming this is "nonsense" represents an incoherent progression of knowledge on this website. The invention of the wheel must continually be "re-proved", and anything clarified on this website may require a re-proving at any later date. It is dysfunctional in terms of accruing a body of informed opinion going forward. The discussion has already occurred, and the weight of the proponents for the point that Saudi is no longer a "decider" has been added up and found to be substantial. Today we have some polemics swirling around this issue which are stirred up primarily by more recent arrivals who simply relish the polemicising. If they were more disinterestedly inquiring about the bottom line instead, they'd be quietly reading up an all the voluminous quantity of posts that have stacked up here last year on this topic.
More to the point, they'd be reading the plentiful quantity of solid reportage out there which substantiates manifest decline of all the worlds major oil fields, with puny replacement prospects countering them.
We are well and truly thrashing a dead mule here. The people here crowing about the fallacy of Peak Cheap Oil are clogging up these pages with a polemic which has grown specious by virtue of summarily ignoring the consensus worldwide, already now causing even the most determined deniers like CERA to bend to the point, and informing the opinions of the top strata of petroleum geologists and government energy panels, that there is no longer any dispute about the easy oil being gone. There is absolutely zero that is any longer polemical about Peak Cheap Oil. But there sure is a lot of hot air flying about on these forum pages recently, distinguished primarily by it's determined obliviousness to all the previous perfectly comprehensive discussion of this topic (which they determinedly don't wish to read) complete with copious linked articles leading to some of the most respected names in the oil industry. If these people want to dance around and naysay the opinions of Henry Groppe and Charley Maxwell they will merely make fools of themselves.
All the proponents of "Peak Oil is Nonsense" are entirely free to position their own life savings according to their beliefs, and get duly flattened by it in the next decade, if they value their rhetorical posture more than the elementary common sense which should instead be governing their financial decisions. When you can see a large steam roller or combine harvester approaching at speed it's considered intelligent to step out of the way. The really good insight to obtain for this decade and the next, is that Saudi Arabia is well and truly, NOT going to be the "decider swing producer" again, in any substantive way. Neither is Russia. That's a big insight, as nobody else even comes close to their production capacity.
But grasping this fairly elementary point seems to be too much wisdom to ask of the Peak Oil Debunkers apparently.
Originally posted by touchring View PostComment
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Re: Oil News
No, what is nonsense is your clearly poor understanding of what has been said.Originally posted by Lukester
I have never once stated Peak Oil was a fraud. Indeed, there are few posts of any kind that attack Peak Oil as being completely ridiculous.
What I have categorically and repeatedly pointed out was that supply is only one part of the equation.
To assume the Peak Oil will end the world also assumes a host of other things.
As we speak, demand in the US is dropping - just as it did in the last 'Oil Shock'.
Shipping costs from China to the US have nearly tripled from $3000 at the end of last year to over $8000 per container. This is not to be understated; the economics of shipping crap to China for labor then back out to where it will be consumed are significantly impacted.
Investment in alternative energy - real and otherwise - is continuing.
To assume the we've reached Peak Oil and Mad Max is coming is the exact same type of argument which Paul Erhlich used to predict mass famine in the 70s.
He was wrong - that time due to the green revolution. But his real mistake was a straight line approximation of then-present day trends to the future.
Your mistake is the same - that Peak Cheap Oil and continuously growing China/India demand will mean the end of days.
It won't be like that.
What's far more likely is the poor nations will suffer horribly, the emerging economies will get stalled and even regress, and the rich countries will suffer relatively.
Maybe we get a nice war or three from the general misery.
Maybe if we're fairly unlucky we get a Hitler and/or Stalin like the last time.
But no matter what - no Mad Max in our lifetime.Comment
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