On the same day the Obama Administration put the kibosh on the Keystone XL pipeline, two engineering contracts totaling $12.2 billion were awarded to two U.S. companies for work in the Alberta oil sands. One included a $750 million contract to a Chicago-based company for work on Exxon’s huge Kearl Oil Sands project, one of [...]
Can we still expect to see sustained economic recoveries when oil, the world’s principal source of energy, is trading in triple digit range? As I argued several years ago in my book, “Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller”, triple digit oil prices will redefine our notion of an economic recovery [...]
Facing growing political and environmental opposition in the U.S. to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, Canada’s landlocked options for exporting its oil have never appeared more costly. Not only has deadheaded oil in Cushing Oklahoma, the present terminus of the pipeline, put a crimp on expansion plans in the oil sands, but the ballooning price [...]
What U.S. presidents seeking re-election fear most is the wrath of a rising misery index. And nothing brings more misery to the world’s largest oil consuming economy than high oil prices. During the 1960s, Arthur Okun, an American economist, created the idea of a misery index to measure economic hardship. It was simply the sum [...]
With the sudden collapse of the Qaddafi regime in Tripoli, the oil industry is hoping it can repair enough of Libya’s damaged export terminals, pumping stations and pipelines to get as much as one million barrels a day of oil flowing into the market within the next six to 12 months. But as I have [...]
The International Energy Agency may not have a solution but no one can accuse them of no longer understanding the gravity of the problem. In their June report, the IEA warned that unless OPEC could increase production by at least 1.5 million barrels a day, world oil demand is going to surpass available supply during [...]