Oil

Libya has an opportunity to get back on track. The end of embargoes and sanctions after the conclusion of the “February Revolution” is favoring a fast production growth. 

A funny thing happened in the last few years when no one was paying attention. J.R. Ewing, the legendary Texas oilman, and his wife Sue Ellen sold Southfork, their ranch near Dallas, and moved to a new home in Pennsylvania (Northfork?). JR immediately began buying subsurface mineral rights for acres of land above the Marcellus and Utica shale formations in the Appalachian Basin.

An ambitious Earth Observation (EO) policy could bring significant benefits to Europe both regarding the fight against climate change and the competitiveness of its EO industry and service sectors.

Last week the IEA chose not to renew its June strategic stock release. It was the right decision. The volumes of strategic crude and product taken up by the market will be reaching refineries now and incremental volumes produced in the Arabian Gulf will be steaming towards markets.

This paper examines the motivations and the potential consequences of the International Energy Agency’s coordinated action to release petroleum stocks on June 23, 2011.

OPEC has certainly gone out of its way to show how little relevance it has in today’s oil market. It has successfully imported all the political rhetoric and malaise of some of its most unstable members.

In polarized politics, the voter must take on faith the wisdom inherent in the principled political position. Who cannot be impressed by the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima, especially after living through the fallout from Chernobyl? But is it reasonable to send the voter to the booth with only half the information? Does the German voter have any idea what it means to shut down its nuclear power in just ten years? Have German politicians made any effort to tell them?

Oil prices are becoming an increasingly worrisome factor in today’s economies. They have risen dramatically over the past 6 or 7 months and are now driving inflation in many economies and acting as a drag on nearly all. They are not at these levels because markets are fundamentally out of balance.

Summing up Europe’s climate policies suggests we still haven’t grasped the full potential for energy savings. We act as if we were living in a system with infinite resources easily exploited by human innovation and ingenuity. We focus on the efficiencies we can gain from components of our system, but not on the system as a whole and we do not consider how the other billions of people on earth can achieve our level of comfort with a resource or carbon-constrained future and with aspirations that necessarily imply sharply growing energy consumption.

One benefit that should flow soon from large new sources of shale gas that have been and will be unleashed into world markets - is the realization that gas prices linked to oil prices don’t make sense any more.

This Actuelle precedes a longer and more exhaustive paper on Electric Vehicles, under the title "The Electric Vehicle in the Climate Change Race: Tortoise, Hare or both?" by Maïté de Boncourt.

As part of the 3*20 targets reached in December 2008, the EC decided that the EU should, by 2020, source 20% of its Final Energy Consumption (FEC) renewably.