Tag Archives: gas

Art Berman, 40-year veteran in the petroleum production industry and respected geological consultant, returns to the podcast this week to talk about oil.

After the price of oil fell from its previous $100+/bbl highs to under $30/bbl in 2015, many declared dead the concerns raised by peak oil theorists. Headlines selling the "shale miracle" have sought to convince us that the US will one day eclipse Saudi Arabia in oil production. In short: cheap, plentiful oil is here to stay.

How likely is this?

Not at all, warns Berman. World demand for oil shows no signs of abating while the outlook for future production looks increasingly scant. And the competition among nations for this "master resource" will be much more intense in future decades than we've been used to.

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The central point of this report is that the US is deluding itself when it comes to energy abundance (generally) and oil (specifically).

The bottom line is this: The US shale industry resembles a fraudulent Ponzi scheme much more so than it does any kind of "miracle".

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Oil expert and geological consultant Art Berman returns to the podcast this week to address head-on the question: Was the Peak Oil theory wrong? With the world "awash" in sub-$50 per barrel oil, were all the warnings about persistently higher future oil prices just a bunch of alarmist hand-wringing?

In a word: No.

Art explains how the current glut of oil created by the US shale boom — along with high crude output by both OPEC and non-OPEC  producers — is a temporary anomaly. Fundamentally, we are not finding nearly as much oil as we need to continue our demand curve; and at the same time, we are extracting our reserves at a faster rate than ever. That's a mathematical recipe for a coming supply crunch. It's not a matter of if, but when.

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It is still a mystery to many historians as to how and why this World War I led to the slaughter of nine million people. But analysis of different parties to the original event, pursuing their own vested interests without a grasp of the bigger picture, certainly rings true of the Ukrainian situation today with regards to the West, embodied in a disparate committee called NATO. The similarity with the chaotic diplomacy that led to WW1 stops there: Russia under Vladimir Putin’s leadership appears to have a good grasp of its objective.

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The US is clearly now pushing Russia towards war. But if you read the signs correctly, Russia has been preparing for exactly this outcome for many years.

Out of several reasons that US power brokers specifically — but western power brokers more generally — are deeply unhappy with Russia right now is that Russia is committing a cardinal sin: it is openly, brazenly calling for an end to dollar dominance and has moved aggressively with China to achieve that aim.

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The US shale oil "miracle" has about as much believability left as Jimmy Swaggart. Just today, we learned that the EIA has placed a hefty downward revision on its estimate of the amount of recoverable oil in the #1 shale reserve in the US, the Monterey in California.

As recently as yesterday, the much-publicized Monterey formation accounted for nearly two-thirds of all technically-recoverable US shale oil resources.

But by this morning? The EIA now estimates these reserves to be 96% lower than it previously claimed.

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