Wednesday, August 19, 2009

We Interupt this vacation to bring you the Energy Crisis...

Whoops!

Perhaps my declaration that the American Energy Crisis had been put on hold for a couple of years was premature...

The U.S. Dept. of Energy's weekly status report shows Oil import declines continue to accelerate and, even as domestic production increased slightly, total petroleum availability continues to decline. Go ahead, click that link. This is either a one off, or the end of the beginning of the end.

This bears careful wathcing. Perhaps the Oil Import Crisis foretold by Jeffrey Brown is truly upon us. I would have said "No", that there was just to much "shut in" production capacity within OPEC. However, if that were the case, it should have been reflected in the price. To my mind, the price is telling me that there just isn't that much "shut in" available to be placed on the world markets.

Stay tuned.



I will be digging through the data over the next couple of days to try to understand what happened

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

OPEC wouldn't be able to keep the member countries sticking to their quotas. At this current oil price, I'm sure most OPEC countries would be pumping all the oil possible. I'm sure all other non opec countries would be doing the same.

The fact that oil prices held around $60-70/barrel suggests that many speculators are onto the peak oil theory. Then this data came out and was a whooper. Sure this is just one week's worth of data and more is needed.

It's crazy that oil imports for the last 4 weeks have averaged 9.2 million/day and in 2004 we had ~13.4 million/day. Adjusted for inflation, I think today's oil price is higher than 2004.

What's odd is after the inventory numbers, I quickly saw news articles on the yahoo finance page saying "Oil won't go to triple digits again". I like how quickly people start denying things, there must be more upside :P

~Dennes

Anonymous said...

Good! I am tired of the swine flu crap. oh, and the banks,health care, ss, forest fires, China, Ophra, AND Bureacrat. Na just kidding Burea. The slide won't be fun with out the opposing view.


Peace

bureaucrat said...

I'm not an opposing view. :) I've been doing the peak oil "I-believe-it" dance since early 2006. I'm just trying to say that factors today make any economic disaster (driven by oil or not) seem very far off in the distance. Jeffers's piece conveniently forgets to mention that U.S. crude oil stored is at 300 million barrels and has been at that level for decades. I also can't wait till the collapsing price in natural gas makes the bigwigs want to try natural gas cars and trucks again. Gaaaa!!!

Anonymous said...

Just bustin your chops

A Quaker in a Strange Land said...

"Days of Supply" is the only issue - not 300 Billion barrels.

Nat Gas? I think we are 2 or at most 3 months away from what will ultimately be a multi generational low price in Nat Gas.

You can take the other side of the trade if you like... may the best analyst win!

bureaucrat said...

In Chicago, natural gas REALLY matters as it gets damn cold here. And with the cancellation of global warming (you seen all the new information about global COOLING in the media lately?), we now have to assess our winter heating budgets accordingly here. The natgas price may go down to nothing, but what if the average Chicago house needs twice as much gas as usual this coming winter and all future winters?

Anonymous said...

>And with the cancellation of global warming (you seen all the new information about global COOLING in the media lately?<

That's right, bureaucrat.

There's no point in listening to climate scientists when those Fox News guys are so much smarter.

Sheesh...

bureaucrat said...

The "climate scientists" may be looking at the wrong things. At one time, 99% of Earth scholars thought the Earth was flat too. I'd like to have a worldwide civil discussion on this, because I think the "other side" may have a point: man-made global warming may be a myth, and we haven't heard from the sunspot people, the sun cycle people and the historical people, who all suggest we may actually be cooling, not warming. This whole global warming thing has the feel of "conventional wisdom gone wrong."

Dan said...

@ Bureaucrat

From a post I made somewhere else a few years ago.

***“If you exclude the biased weather stations such as this one that has air conditioning exhaust blowing on it, then we have a cooling trend on the remaining stations that matches the cooling data from weather satellites.

It seems to me that Milankovitch cycles cause earths climate variations; a combination of orbital eccentricity, variations in axial tilt and the precession of the equinoxes. It stands to reason that when it’s winter during our closest approach to the sun the South Seas will moderate the temperature but when it happens in summer variations will be more extreme due to the greater northern land mass. It’s hard to believe what we do on earth will have a greater effect than the combined effects."***

The only thing I would add is to keep in mind that when the southern hemisphere is closest to the sun at the closest approach the oceans act as a heat sink and moderate but when it is the north the extremes are more extreme.

Dan said...

The moved it, Precession should link here.

Anonymous said...

I really think a lot of the global warming dogma is political, and driven by the EU's need to get people weened off of oil ASAP. The science just does not hold up.

There is much evidence that the political proponents of global warming take it all with a grain of salt. Chinese and Indian CO2 have been determined by international treaty to have no climatological effect, whatsoever. Even the bloated floating turd, Al Gore, bought himself a 10,000 sq ft house (That's about 100 square meters for you metric folks). Either he doesn't believe his own bulls#!t or conservation is for the rest of us.

If you believe that there is an American energy crisis, it is nothing to compare to the European energy crisis. They have a bit of coal, a bit of gas, the remainder of the North Sea oil and Russia to depend upon to fill the gap. It is a hellish position to be in. The US, by comparison, has large coal and gas reserves. It produces just about half of its petroleum needs. I'm glad to live here!

To the point, global warming is just part of a Big Lie to get things in the EU moving along ahead of disaster. Global warming has recently been renamed "Climate Change." Anybody want to hazard a guess why? Perhaps TPTB are worried because the temperature data are no longer cooperating. Be quite certain that they are cooking up a story to explain how driving cars is causing global cooling.

Personally, I don't believe that the end justifies the means. This kind of manipulation is disgusting and ultimately destructive to democracy and human rights.

Regards,

Coal Guy.