Olieprijs op 55 dollar; OPEC verlaagt productie

quote:

Op maandag 22 september 2008 21:48 schreef SeLang het volgende:

[..]

Het lijkt op een soort van shortsqueeze.
Vandaag was de laatste dag dat het October contract verhandeld kon worden. Traders die niet fysiek de olie willen leveren or geleverd willen krijgen MOETEN hun contract op z'n laatst vandaag sluiten. Het lijkt erop dat er traders short zaten en nu tegen elke prijs contracten terug moesten kopen omdat ze anders de plicht hebben om olie te leveren die ze niet hebben.

quote:

If Matt Simmons is right, the recent drop in crude prices is an illusion - and oil could be headed for the stratosphere. He's just hoping we can prevent civilization from imploding.

(Fortune Magazine) -- Matt Simmons is as perplexed as anyone that it has fallen to him to take on OPEC, Exxon, the Saudis, and all the other misguided defenders of conventional wisdom in the oil patch. Why should one investment banker with a penchant for research be required to point out what he regards as the obvious - that from here on out, oil supplies can't meet demand, and if we don't act soon to solve this crisis, World War III could be looming?

Why should a man who scorns most environmentalists have to argue that locally grown produce and wind power are the way of the future? Why should a lifelong Republican need to be the one to point out that his party's new mantra - "Drill, baby, drill!" - won't really fix anything and that his party's presidential candidate is clueless about energy? That the spike in oil prices earlier this year wasn't a temporary market anomaly and the recent retreat in prices is just a misleading calm before a calamitous storm? That we're headed toward $500-a-barrel oil?


[..]
And so he did. But writing the book didn't exhaust his passion. Today he is more convinced than ever that we've reached peak oil. If he's right, current world oil production- 86 million barrels a day- is about as high as we're going to go.
[..]
No one disputes that oil production will top out some day. It is, after all, a finite resource. The argument is about how far off the peak is. As Simmons and others point out, many of the world's largest oilfields - Prudhoe Bay, the North Sea - have already gone into decline. The most optimistic estimate for the average depletion rate of the world's currently producing oilfields is between 4% and 5% annually, or about four million barrels per day at our current rate of production. That means that each year we must find enough new oil to first replace those four million barrels of lost daily production before we even add enough to meet new demand. This is all the more worrisome because world oil discovery of new reserves has been slowing since the mid-20th century.
[..]
Earlier this year Abdallah Jum'ah, CEO of Saudi Aramco, the kingdom's national oil company, called peak oil "a myth." The multinational oil giants are only slightly less optimistic. While they acknowledge that crude is getting harder to find and produce and that so-called unconventional oil (like natural-gas liquids) will be increasingly important, they don't think a peak is imminent either. Exxon Mobil (XOM, Fortune 500) has run ads that dismiss peak oil as a far-off problem. This summer Tony Hayward, BP's (BP) chief executive, bet a peakist that oil production in 2018 will be higher than it is today. "It's unbelievable," says Simmons. "These guys don't even understand their own business."

One difficulty in assessing the situation is the lack of transparent information about oil production and reserves, particularly in OPEC countries. Back in the 1980s, after OPEC decided to base its production quotas on reserve figures, several of the cartel's producers abruptly raised their claims of "proven reserves" by 40% or more. Saudi Arabia, for instance, raised its proven-reserve figure from 170 billion barrels to about 260 billion in 1988. Amazingly, that figure has stayed more or less constant since then - even as billions of barrels have been pumped out of the ground. "We need to send in the audit troops," says Simmons regularly in his speeches. "The major oilfields of the world need to be invaded by third-party inspectors so that we can figure out how bad things are and deal with it."
[..]
John McCain is energy illiterate," Simmons is saying. "He's just witless about this stuff. As a lifelong Republican, I'm supporting Obama." A dozen oil and gas men sitting around a conference table in Lafayette, La., chuckle nervously as he continues. "McCain says, 'Oh, we're going to wean ourselves off foreign oil in four years and build 45 nuclear plants by 2030.' He doesn't have a clue."
[..]
McCain's midsummer move to begin campaigning on a platform of more offshore drilling has only hardened Simmons's position. "What a hypocrite," says Simmons, who supported McCain's rival Mitt Romney in the primary - no surprise given Simmons's history with the Romney family. "Here's a man who for at least the past 15 years has strenuously, I mean strenuously, opposed offshore drilling. And now it's 'drill, drill, drill.' And he doesn't have any idea that we don't have any drilling rigs. Or that we don't have any idea of exactly where to drill." (As for McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, Simmons says: "She's a very colorful person, but I don't think there's a scrap of evidence that she knows anything about energy.")
[..]
Simmons believes that a radical change in the way we live is inevitable. "We should basically be going back to creating a village economy, so that we really reduce the energy intensity of how we live," he says. "We need bigtime conservation, not feel-good conservation. Make things where they're used. You'll end long-distance commuting, and we have the tools to do that now with webcams. Grow food locally. Grow food in your backyard. If they're not commuting, people will have time to do that."
[..]
On the way out, I asked Simmons if seeing the lab made his virtual institute feel more real. "Oh, yeah, very impressive," he said. "But we need to compress the time frame - 2020 is way too far out. That plan is fine assuming that we go along like we are now, and everything is okay in the world. But it's not going to be okay. We're going to need this stuff much sooner."

quote:

Op dinsdag 23 september 2008 11:04 schreef RM-rf het volgende:
omdat die 'matt simons' toevallig zegt wat jij de hele tijd hard loopt te denken?


nee sorry, maar als de prijsontwikkeling nu juist iets bewijst is dat de marktprijsontwikkeling verdomd weinig nog met daadwerkelijk aanbod en vraag te maken heeft maar dat allerhande effecten van de markt, zoals het 'aflopen van short-contracten' er een veel grotere invloed op hebben...

quote:

Uiteindelijk is het wel een ontzettend groot nadeel voor de aantrekkelijkheid van olie deze ongezonde prijsfluctuaties, maar dat is dan weer zelf een voordeel voor eventuele investeringen in aanpassingen van de energie-voorziening, waardoor de economie steeds onafhankelijker van olie wordt ...
dat is overigens al een aspect dat allang aan de gang is.... de afhankelijkheid van olie voor energie is stukken minder dan in de 70'er jaren: er bestaan veel meer energie-alternatieven die zeer kosten-efficient zijn en marktgedrag op de oliemarkt als die nu plaats vind versterkt enkel het voordeel daarvan....

quote:

Uitspraken als
[..]

zijn wat mij beteft een teken van iemand met een zeer zwak verstand ...we leven hier niet in en communistische maatschappij waarbij de 'manier waarop mensen leven' kennelijk van bovenaf bepaald kan worden en ik denk niet dat dat een idee is waarnaar we moeten streven