Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Analysts at Deutsche Bank believe that, after 2008, almost half the opportunities for oil companies will be in LNG, GTL and the Venezuelan and Canadian oil sands, with deep water projects making up another quarter of the expected openings. But oil companies diverge on the need to get into such projects.
A retired Irish geologist is at the center of a small, but suddenly influential, band of contrarians known as the peak-oil movement, which believes that by as early as next year, humanity will have burned through half the oil it will ever get, and that the era of cheap oil is over.
Ties together the cash-rich oil multinationals, US VP Cheney’s Energy Task Force, and the drive to privatise Middle East oil reserves via a war for ‘freedom and democracy’.
Oil producers’ struggle to keep up with rampant global demand growth will only be won with access to oilfields now off-limits, Exxon Mobil chief executive Lee Raymond said yesterday.
IF THEY sound worried, it is because they are desperate. The multinational oil companies are rolling in cash but they have little to spend it on.
Big Oil met national oil Thursday during an OPEC-sponsored conference of the world’s most powerful companies, from Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch-Shell to Saudi Aramco and Venezuela’s PDVSA.
The Kremlin moves swiftly to strengthen its vertical power by giving the green light to a merger between Gazprom and state-owned Rosneft, paving the way for the consolidation of the state’s control over the energy sector.
Russia has warned that production licences of foreign and domestic oil companies can be torn up at will if the nation’s fabulous natural wealth is not exploited on Moscow’s terms.
A boast by Mexico’s Pemex that it may have spotted new deposits big enough to double its oil reserves has put fresh pressure on the state energy monopoly to finalize joint ventures needed to access the potential deposits.
Western oil companies are running out of likely places to look, and significant finds are growing rarer. With the most accessible areas either already picked clean or kept off limits for political reasons, exploration teams are having to push into harsher, more remote and less promising territory, where the costs and risks are high.
Consumers may be up in arms, but a host of law firms are reaping the benefits of the UK’s dwindling gas supplies as preparations hot up for the country’s first liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminals.
With the price of oil hovering around US$40 per barrel, it is easy to assume that the oil-producing countries are laughing all the way to the bank. Indonesia, a seasoned player in the yo-yo market of oil revenue, has been careful not to take the current financial windfall too far, however, and for good reason.
