Month: August 2017

“It will likely be years before the oil and gas industry can start drilling off the Atlantic coast, even in the best-case scenario. But even then, it is unclear if there will be any interest. The Atlantic has not been explored very much, and as a result, the exact nature of the oil and gas reserves in place is unknown. That likely means that development costs will be high. If oil prices fail to rise much from current levels, it is not at all clear that the Atlantic will be very competitive.”

Nick Cunningham, Oilprice.com

“When interest rates fall, this tends to allow oil prices to rise, and thus allows increased production. This postpones the Peak Oil crisis, but makes the ultimate crisis worse…Falling interest rates between 1981 and 2014 are one of the things that allowed Peak Oil to be postponed for many years…. Peak Economy is likely not very far away. We do not need to encourage it, by raising interest rates and selling securities held by the Federal Reserve. We badly need more people to understand the connection between interest rates and oil prices, and how important it is that interest rates not rise.”

Gail Tverberg, actuary and commentator (8/16)

[After two nuclear plants in South Carolina were cancelled:] “We continue to believe that the problem with new nuclear (small modular units excepted) power plants is not that they generate electricity with nuclear fission. The difficulty is economic. The nuclear units are expensive, base load generating units in a world where production of electricity is becoming less expensive and increasingly decentralized. Base load power plants (and especially nuclear ones) are, in general, must-run, inflexible price takers. Going forward there will be less need for those facilities regardless of how they are fueled. Furthermore, the builder of a nuclear plant must bet an enormous sum on the need for electricity a decade hence, when the plant is completed. Given the uncertainty in power demand and prices, that is a gamble uncompensated in the regulatory process.

By Leonard Hyman and William Tilles for Oilprice.com