Clean and Green Investment Forum

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Jonathan Callahan

On December 3 and 4 I attended Opal Financial’s Clean and Green Investment Forum. I was invited to moderate a panel on “Market Outlook for Renewables vs Fossil Fuels”. Forum participants included many investors and strategists with an interest in energy issues as well as a few entrepreneurs and others with a more academic interest. I had conversations with an interesting mix of people in both the oil and gas industry as well as alternative energy. This post consolidates my notes to give you a sense of the dominant themes in energy investments today.

Rather than give a blow-by-blow recap of the meeting, I’ll organize the information
into several themes that capture the mood of the forum:

  • government regulation and incentives
  • utility scale solar & wind
  • resiliency and distributed solar
  • new technology
  • the fracking revolution

read more …

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Renewed Trouble in the Falklands

Posted on July 13, 2012 by Jonathan Callahan

A recent headline in The Guardian brings the Falkand islands back to our attention:

Falkland Islands: Premier Oil plan leads UK and Argentina to new dispute

Britain put itself on a collision course with Argentina over the disputed sovereignty of the Falkland Islands when it gave explicit support to a £600m plan to develop oil reserves in the south Atlantic on Wednesday.

Barely three weeks since the two countries clashed over the issue at a G20 summit, and 30 years on from the military conflict on the islands, the Foreign Office has made it clear that hydrocarbons exploration in the area is a legitimate business.

I covered this same story back in July 2010 with a post titled Oil Discovery in Falklands and ended that post with the following: read more …

Posted in Headlines | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Energy Export Databrowser updated to BP 2012 data

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Jonathan Callahan

All language versions of the Energy Export Databrowser are now using the latest version of the BP Statistical Review:

Deutsch English Español Français Italiano Nederlands Svensk

A few of the stories found in the data include:

1) Oil Consumption in Greece

As the Greek economy falters, balance of trade issues are forcing Greeks to reduce their consumption of expensive, imported oil. Other countries displaying the same rapid consumption decline include Ireland, Portugal and Spain.

read more …

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Don’t Blame the Speculators

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Mazama_admin

This is a guest post by Derik Andreoli, Senior Analyst at Mercator International LLC (dandreoli@mercatorintl.com)

Never trust a politician to explain oil prices

I believe in markets. I believe that when supply falls short of demand, prices increase, and in doing so, send signals to consumers to conserve and producers to invest. I bet you agree.

Yet, when it comes to the price of oil and fuel, a significant portion of the population believes that Wall Street speculators are responsible for driving prices above the level supported by the fundamentals of supply and demand. While this explanation may be politically expedient, it reveals more about the politicians who have been promoting it than the oil market itself. read more …

Posted in Analysis, Headlines | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Easy Predictions

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Jonathan Callahan

Ten days ago in the Gas Boom Goes Bust post I wrote:

We should expect 2012 to be a year in which we see a variety of knock-on effects:

  • Natural gas producers and investors with poor hedge books and too much debt will end up in bankruptcy court.
  • Drilling operations will focus on liquids-rich plays only.
  • Jobs creation in the natural gas drilling industry will fall well short of expectations.
  • Several older coal-fired plants will close.
  • New wind power generation will fall — especially if the production tax credit is not extended.
  • Natural gas fueled fleet vehicles should become more popular.

These were admittedly easy predictions to make but confirmation is coming in faster than I expected:

At this rate, I expect to hear about cancelled wind turbine projects next week and complaints about missing drilling jobs in a month. Bankruptcies by summer?

[... EDIT ... ]

Oops, should have done a little more research. Here are some more links courtesy of a comment from Paul Nash at The Oil Drum:

More Confirmation

Posted in Headlines | Tagged , , | Leave a comment