Cardboard Posted June 13, 2017 Share Posted June 13, 2017 You may argue about his position sizing but, completion is definitely where pricing power is the highest right now. So if oil goes up $5-10/barrel from here, these guys will experience a gold rush as capacity is already tight right now and pricing is still going up despite the recent oil rout. So their earnings will move massively while E&P's will see a nice improvement. Of course, valuation and price paid dictate future ROR on an investment but, there are very good overlooked opportunities in the completion space with ESN and BRY being among my favourites. Cardboard Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
valcont Posted June 13, 2017 Share Posted June 13, 2017 You may argue about his position sizing but, completion is definitely where pricing power is the highest right now. So if oil goes up $5-10/barrel from here, these guys will experience a gold rush as capacity is already tight right now and pricing is still going up despite the recent oil rout. So their earnings will move massively while E&P's will see a nice improvement. Of course, valuation and price paid dictate future ROR on an investment but, there are very good overlooked opportunities in the completion space with ESN and BRY being among my favourites. Cardboard All I am saying is that his thesis is flawed.He starts by claiming that the macro and quant funds are keeping the price artificially low. Lets run with that. In the next page he claims that the world's supply/demand will be balanced and the prices will rise. Ok but what about those "Quant and Macro funds"? If they can keep the prices low now , wouldn't they do the same next year? Oh btw, I only know of one cartel in the oil industry and they are definitely not on the bears side. I am not bearish on energy, most commodities mean revert and this time is no different. Don't be fooled by the relative calm of few years in Middle East. Its matter of time before those tribal animosities will come out with vengeance and it'll be 1974 again. BTW frac sand has run its course imo. Look at Silica, HiCrush. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JayGatsby Posted June 13, 2017 Share Posted June 13, 2017 You may argue about his position sizing but, completion is definitely where pricing power is the highest right now. So if oil goes up $5-10/barrel from here, these guys will experience a gold rush as capacity is already tight right now and pricing is still going up despite the recent oil rout. So their earnings will move massively while E&P's will see a nice improvement. Of course, valuation and price paid dictate future ROR on an investment but, there are very good overlooked opportunities in the completion space with ESN and BRY being among my favourites. Cardboard What are you basing this on? Reason I ask is I have a small holding of Forbes Energy reorg equity, which does well servicing in Texas. They've experienced some increase in utilization, but pricing has been awful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cardboard Posted June 13, 2017 Share Posted June 13, 2017 I am mostly invested in the WCSB vs U.S. and I based this on similar comments made by various E&P's in Q1 who had to delay well completions due to lack of crews/equipment and that pricing for everything has been going up and continues. Cardboard Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SharperDingaan Posted June 13, 2017 Share Posted June 13, 2017 Being a good capitalist :D we prefer to follow the money ... The Saudi Aramco IPO is coming up. It will best be served if there is either a calm market, or one in which uncertainty in the Gulf is driving up oil prices. It is also highly likely that SA is NOT the only Gulf State looking to do a IPO. Qatar suggests the Gulf States have opted for regime change uncertainty; the US base in Doha protecting the oil fields, and the recent arms sales to SA protecting the Emirs. The Exxons are moving into the US shale fields to balance their off-shore production. Nobody wants to pay more than they have to, so there will be a lid on how high WTI can go. Once the Gulf State IPOs are over, it is hard to see how we do not come back to a $55 WTI upper band again. All of which speaks to a preference for option-like investing, and not the traditional buy-and-hold-forever approach. SD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sculpin Posted June 13, 2017 Author Share Posted June 13, 2017 Being a good capitalist :D we prefer to follow the money ... The Saudi Aramco IPO is coming up. It will best be served if there is either a calm market, or one in which uncertainty in the Gulf is driving up oil prices. It is also highly likely that SA is NOT the only Gulf State looking to do a IPO. Qatar suggests the Gulf States have opted for regime change uncertainty; the US base in Doha protecting the oil fields, and the recent arms sales to SA protecting the Emirs. The Exxons are moving into the US shale fields to balance their off-shore production. Nobody wants to pay more than they have to, so there will be a lid on how high WTI can go. Once the Gulf State IPOs are over, it is hard to see how we do not come back to a $55 WTI upper band again. All of which speaks to a preference for option-like investing, and not the traditional buy-and-hold-forever approach. SD $55 upper band ?? What do you think will happen to the likes of Vz and countries that need at least $70 Brent like Saudi, Iraq, Iran over the long term or their propped up governments will collapse at $55. Do you think US shale will make up for all of the declines in the ROW, deep offshore, etc etc at $55. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SharperDingaan Posted June 13, 2017 Share Posted June 13, 2017 We think there is a 50%+ chance that at least 1 of these wild cards will occur (the squall lines we refer to). No idea as to timing, or whether the single event sets off another as well. But when it occurs we think the demand will initially be met by 1) opening the existing taps wide, 2) inventory draw-down, and 3) new shale. The supply-demand imbalance will be managed as much as possible, to prevent a higher price triggering a new round of shale drilling. Hence while in the next 2 years we may spike over 55, its unlikely to be sustainable . 50-55 versus 45-50 is just best guess; we know the Gulf States need the money, so we are more inclined to 50-55. For the US to benefit we need friendly taps, and depleted inventory. Send the Donald to visit the Kingdom. SD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JayGatsby Posted June 13, 2017 Share Posted June 13, 2017 I am mostly invested in the WCSB vs U.S. and I based this on similar comments made by various E&P's in Q1 who had to delay well completions due to lack of crews/equipment and that pricing for everything has been going up and continues. Cardboard Interesting. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tombgrt Posted June 19, 2017 Share Posted June 19, 2017 https://shift.newco.co/this-is-how-big-oil-will-die-38b843bd4fe0 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paarslaars Posted June 19, 2017 Share Posted June 19, 2017 I'm sure everyone agrees on the fact that and how oil will die. The whole investment thesis in oil is based on timing, when will oil die? 2025 seems strongly exaggerated, he's comparing the death of 2 types of technology with that of a finite resource. Just because people starting building houses out of brick instead of wood, doesn't mean the wood industry perished. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tombgrt Posted June 19, 2017 Share Posted June 19, 2017 Sure of course. But combined with the fact that shale does indeed but a price cap on oil, I don't see how this space is looking all that attractive both in the short and in the long term. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmp8822 Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 Does someone want to make a guess as to what is really happening out there? I guess logically, the reason I'm interested in oil is because investment in new production should have dropped substantially, coupled with natural declines of wells worldwide, which would eventually lead to higher prices. Am I missing something? Is worldwide investment in new production up, not down? Do oil wells not actually decline? Have no worldwide producers decided that $50 is not enough revenue to produce oil? Out of 100 million barrels of daily production, everyone is making money and will never stop producing? It doesn't add up to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Uccmal Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 Does someone want to make a guess as to what is really happening out there? I guess logically, the reason I'm interested in oil is because investment in new production should have dropped substantially, coupled with natural declines of wells worldwide, which would eventually lead to higher prices. Am I missing something? Is worldwide investment in new production up, not down? Do oil wells not actually decline? Have no worldwide producers decided that $50 is not enough revenue to produce oil? Out of 100 million barrels of daily production, everyone is making money and will never stop producing? It doesn't add up to me. Oil was low for the entire 1990s..way lower than this. In the interim alot has happened. My best guess is that oil stays in a see-saw pattern of supply/demand comng in and out of balance for the foreseeable future. To profit in this environment a company has to have really good management. Everyone has bought their costs down in the free world. The oligarchy is no longer able to dictate prices. That is the new paradigm. Saudi Aramco missed the boat on an IPO. We are caught in a paradigm shift. Renewable usage, improvements in efficiencies with the usage of oil, and so forth ensure that the price never goes very high again. I am guessing that demand has peaked. The markets are telling us that the world is oversupplied today, and the OPEC cuts, if they are being followed are only managing to keep oil at these prices. If people think the market is being manipulated down somehow I would like to see evidence. We have seen very public attempts to get the price up but it isn't working. Maybe we see a price spike at some point in a couple of years but that will only fuel renewable development. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldfinger Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 On shale profitability at these levels (and around 50$/boe too): http://oilpro.com/post/31703/attempt-to-help-don-minter-his-math?utm_source=DailyNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_term=2017-06-21&utm_content=Article_7_txt On renewables: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608126/in-sharp-rebuttal-scientists-squash-hopes-for-100-percent-renewables/ https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/wind-turbines-are-neither-clean-nor-green-and-they-provide-zero-global-energy/# https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/06/13/wind-power-fails-in-canada-a-23-year-life-span-not-likely-to-be-replaced/ etc... etc... etc... On Future energy mix: http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/oil-and-gas/our-insights/energy-2050-insights-from-the-ground-up On Current oil market technicals: https://twitter.com/TheVolawatcher/status/877602556578418689 (and it seems that imports from SA are about to go much lower next week as traffic shows no new tanker coming) On future prices: attached pdf (slide 10) Not claiming this is a complete set (I have no time to expand) but just trying to break from the platitudes that we hear on the more bearish side lately.Rystad+Henrik+oil+and+gas+markets+-+Egypt+feb+2017+v1.0+handout.pdf Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cardboard Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 Good material to read Goldfinger. The market is definitely manipulated. The futures or "paper" market is multiple times the size of physical exchanges and if you are right on a $1 move you can make millions with little money due to the enormous leverage. It is a short term thing vs long term so traders play with sentiment. Does it make sense to you that the world is only focused on one report on Wednesday morning at 10:30 am which only discusses U.S. supply and demand? And by the way, the report was positive today and the oil market still dropped 2 to 3% not long after. There was some talk about some planned production increase somewhere (I missed it) in 2018 and bang. Push it down on "some" rumour. It has been exactly 3 years since oil started its decline. Looking back, oil was oversupplied already for well over a year. I know since I had bought some oil stocks in 2013 that were into "restructuring" and I had written down the imbalance in the oil market as a risk. So for a long time this was ignored and oil remained at $100+ for a variety of reasons: supply risk, China growth, Ukraine risk, you name it. Today, it is about the exact reverse in fundamentals where inventories are declining worldwide, market is in a deficit, long lead projects have been cancelled, OPEC and non-OPEC are cutting supply (voluntarily or due to a lack of funds to grow/offset declines?). The reality is that growth in demand has continued this year and continues so obviously Uccmal is wrong, for now anyway, about peak demand. When you add 1 to 1.5 million barrels/day of demand growth each year, combined with 3 to 5 million barrels/day of natural decline, it becomes pretty obvious that the U.S. increasing supply by a few hundred thousand barrels/day won't suffice. Then you have Libya coming back on line and Nigeria getting back to normal. These last two have contributed a lot to the recent "offset" to cuts but, for how long? They are part of OPEC too so I would think that at least Nigeria is about to see pressure from other members. The rest of the world nobody talks about and that is roughly 40% of production. There is no shale in that bucket, no oil sands, no announced cuts. However, a lot of these countries have seen decline for years under good conditions. Many that look promising such as Brazil are in deep trouble with high offshore costs and government crisis. China is declining, Mexico and most others. It is actually amazing that the oil market is currently in a supply deficit considering the gift that Obama has made to the Iranians. That is a lot more oil than what the U.S. has added to the market on average since early 2015. Libya is also a big factor, then the Saudis who increased it a lot before curtailing. Eventually jmp8822 all of this will matter. And when people panic to get their hands on a commodity that is in need, it can be crazy. Just look at the price of Met Coal since early 2016. A few disruptions in Australia and that is all it took to get the price to rise like crazy. Yup, dirty coal to make steel rising like crazy! Today you have guys like Al, the media and many others talking about renewables and electric cars. These guys all seem to ignore that it requires copper, silver, lithium, cobalt, rare metals to make these things work. It requires space (a lot actually), wind, sun, transmission lines to produce and deliver energy that for the moment cannot be stored effectively. And they also ignore that you have a world growing in population and per capita demand growth. While some will identify me as some kind of polluter, I am just a realist. Things will transition but, it will take many years. Cardboard Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Uccmal Posted June 22, 2017 Share Posted June 22, 2017 Its always funny how people will justify thier investments with endless articles and data points, WHEN no one really has no idea, and no ability to predict the future beyond a few months. Cardboard has been doing this for over two years on this thread and others. So when does this turn happen? Before the world goes into recession, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021? At some point demand will peak, and start to drop off. We used to play this if only game with Fairfax. They are great investors. If only they had the capital to invest, since their insurance companies always lose money. Now they have the capital to invest and their insurance companies are profitable... if only they could invest. And Goldfinger, I could turn around and produce opposite articles from credible sources. Texas gets 1/4 of its electricity from wind. California produces more energy then they can get rid of from renewables. China doubled the worlds solar capacity last year. And so on. If oil goes way up I will make money. If it doesn't I will make money. I have always been flexible enough in my thinking to consider other ways things may unfold. I am not angry, but I am done with this thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldfinger Posted June 22, 2017 Share Posted June 22, 2017 No one is trying to justify a thesis beyond the point of reasonable doubt. And no one denies that renewables are growing in the future (we actually absolutely need it, e need most sources of energy we can find by the same token...). It is just that at the moment everyone repeats the same arguments: - EV(s) - Tesla - (The experience of Norway is kind of interesting with oil consumption increasing with rapid growth of EV sales and large gov subsidies in that direction and a green country with plenty of good will). - Renewables (plenty of subsidies and actually solar would make the grid less competitive at first making EV ramp up a difficult task). - Peak Oil demand (Even McKinsey sees it as far in the future) - Shale (well let's see what would happen if they cannot hedge at higher prices than today in the next 2 quarters...) - World swimming in oil (Global inventories are starting to depict another perspective) If someone digs into the nitty gritty details - this is just much more complicated but oil is still needed for a long period of time at a higher level than today and necessary supply capacity comes at a higher price point (including shale in the equation - Rystad probably has the best database for upstream companies). This crisis comes from a prolonged period at 90-110$ oil and it takes time to flush excesses. Also, as most recent crisis reminded us of, markets crisis do not end in crash - there are repeats (reminds me of the recent 2011/12 experience with financials). Recent supply reports are actually more bullish than the market is giving credit for but sentiment is just negative. I am seeing almost no tankers coming for SA in the last week, so their targeting of US storage is probably not bullshit and that should shake some bears pretty soon. Anyway the laws of depletion are immutable like gravity and time at these prices ranges goes against the bear thesis big time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HJ Posted June 22, 2017 Share Posted June 22, 2017 Oil price goes through long cycles. Last real down cycle, we went from nominal high of $38 in 1980 to nominal low of $9 in 1999. In hindsight, we can all say with confidence that #38 was too high and $9 was too low. Along the way, we brought on production in the North Sea and Alaska, but then we also had LatAm crisis, the Soviet Union broke up, Japan started its unique deflationary journey, and the Asian crisis, which finally gave us THE low after a 2-decade ordeal, all the while volume was going up on both supply and demand side, not necessarily in sync with each other. What affected prices was clearly not just supply volume, demand volume and the marginal cost of production. There were currency movements, geopolitical events, factors which are unimaginable for any oil price prognosticator in the early 80's, but factors that clearly drove sentiments, and affected prices in the years to come. We are now 3 years into a supply shock after a 3-decade period of relatively uninterrupted worldwide economic boom, driven by globalization and a modernizing China. For the time being, we seem to have settled into a new range of say $40 - $60. Are we already so confident that prices will break to the upside and stay above in the near future? Think all the potential geopolitical events in Europe and LatAm, a rapidly aging China, globalization which seems to have lost its 2 most enthusiastic proponents in US and Britain and a US economic expansion that is 9 years old. There are just so many factors that basing price prediction just on a thorough study of the world wide marginal cost of supply (if it can be done so thoroughly) may not be sufficient. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JayGatsby Posted June 22, 2017 Share Posted June 22, 2017 "In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cardboard Posted June 22, 2017 Share Posted June 22, 2017 HJ, Regarding cycle, we are not 3 years but, 9 years into a down cycle as the nominal price peak was in 2008 at around $140/barrel. And along the way we have had 2 drops or one in 2008-2009 and one now since June 2014. If I simply divide $9 by $38, I get 23.7% or a price drop of 76.3% over 19 years to reach the absolute low. If I divide $26 by $140, I obtain 18.6% or a price drop of 81.4% over less than 8 years to reach a low of $26 in February 2016. So a deeper and really sharp drop from the historical data that you presented. Kind of demonstrates the beauty of the Efficient Market Theory ::) and how a consensus from millions of people with all available information can deviate so much from a reasonable price expectation. The power of optimism and pessimism are definitely stronger than fundamentals. Cardboard Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Uccmal Posted June 22, 2017 Share Posted June 22, 2017 I said I wouldn't post on this thread again :) but I am like a schizophrenic addict. I am not agnostic on this topic. I happen to hold over 100 k of Whitecap stock and the aforementioned Russell Metals, and Mullen Group. But I want to protect the downside as well. I dumped the PWT and BTE. PWT will do well if, and only if oil goes into the 55 range. BTE is overleveraged, and in a prolonged down environment they go out of business, or more likely a richer operator takes them out at a low price. This week: 4 executives of WCP have reported buying large numbers of shares. 50% of the oil is hedged at above 50 USD for the first half of this year. I am guessing they are taking big gains on these hedges this week. They have also recently issued 200 M in a private placement at 4.32%. And they have set up their share buyback account: Nothing has been reported yet. And they are considering increasing the dividend which is around 3% right now: My guess is they will leave this on hold until their cash flows at any given price have been confirmed, and are in the door. And the stock price is very near the lows experienced in early 2016, when oil was sub $30. In general: There are so many data points and information on each side of the equation that it is impossible to quantify. One thing I know is that nearly every E and P operating in NA has increased production this year. Rig counts in the US have been increasing weekly all year. We have no real idea of how much oil is recoverable in the key formations in NA. In 2007 the notion of fracking had just been born and it proved to be a game changer. And that is just NA. Costs are way down for sea drilling due to technological improvement, and I suspect alot of cleaning up of the financial excesses generated during the high price days. They had gotten sloppy, in other words. And then there is the possibility of a recession which grows each day. If we are going to believe oil is in a cycle, then we cant simultaneously ignore the economic cycle. It has been dampened and muted by cheap money for a long time but how long will that work? Excesses are building up throughout the economy from cheap debt. And then there is the narrative of demand becoming muted due to alternatives which we have beaten to death on this thread. We dont know how this will play out. To me it says that nothing is going to be straight forward. So, IMO, it is best to own really good operators or stay out of the game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paarslaars Posted June 22, 2017 Share Posted June 22, 2017 Wouldn't it be best to buy the cheapest ones that you have confidence can survive until oil goes up? Cause if you believe it won't go up again, even the best operators are a poor investment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sculpin Posted June 22, 2017 Author Share Posted June 22, 2017 Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy We urgently need to stop the ecological posturing and invest in gas and nuclear The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’. You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance. Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth. Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry. Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation. Even in rich countries playing with subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours. If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s. At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area greater than the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfil the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs. Do not take refuge in the idea that wind turbines could become more efficient. There is a limit to how much energy you can extract from a moving fluid, the Betz limit, and wind turbines are already close to it. Their effectiveness (the load factor, to use the engineering term) is determined by the wind that is available, and that varies at its own sweet will from second to second, day to day, year to year. As machines, wind turbines are pretty good already; the problem is the wind resource itself, and we cannot change that. It’s a fluctuating stream of low–density energy. Mankind stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good. As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips. It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy. A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year (or a smaller number of bigger ones), just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal–mining output. Forgive me if you have heard this before, but I have a commercial interest in coal. Now it appears that the black stuff also gives me a commercial interest in ‘clean’, green wind power. The point of running through these numbers is to demonstrate that it is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the late David MacKay pointed out years back, the arithmetic is against such unreliable renewables. The truth is, if you want to power civilisation with fewer greenhouse gas emissions, then you should focus on shifting power generation, heat and transport to natural gas, the economically recoverable reserves of which — thanks to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — are much more abundant than we dreamed they ever could be. It is also the lowest-emitting of the fossil fuels, so the emissions intensity of our wealth creation can actually fall while our wealth continues to increase. Good. And let’s put some of that burgeoning wealth in nuclear, fission and fusion, so that it can take over from gas in the second half of this century. That is an engineerable, clean future. Everything else is a political displacement activity, one that is actually counterproductive as a climate policy and, worst of all, shamefully robs the poor to make the rich even richer. https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/wind-turbines-are-neither-clean-nor-green-and-they-provide-zero-global-energy/# Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldfinger Posted June 22, 2017 Share Posted June 22, 2017 Very nice interview for one the heads at PIRA: http://www.bnn.ca/video/a-guru-s-call-on-crude~1152595 Balanced, well informed, "far away from noise of all types" overview of the oil market now and in the next decade. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jeffmori7 Posted June 22, 2017 Share Posted June 22, 2017 Here is the latest summary about renewables on the planet: http://www.ren21.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/17-8399_GSR_2017_Full_Report_0621_Opt.pdf For a little summary: Total final energy consumption 2015: 78.4% fossil fuels, 2.3% nuclear, 19.3% renewables, with wind+solar+biomass power+geothermal power at just 1.6%. For electricity production at the end of 2016: Non-renewable 75.5%, renewable 24.5%, including 16.6% hydro, Wind at 4% and Solar PV at 1.5% Still a long way to go, but those are the actual numbers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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