More wailing and knashing of teeth
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsb...oil-prices.html
Quote:
Whatever action Opec agrees to take next week to halt the sharp decline in the value of crude, experts agree that one thing is clear: the world is entering into an era of lower oil prices that the group is almost powerless to change.
This new energy paradigm may result in oil trading at much lower levels than the $100 (£64) per barrel that consumers have grown used to paying over the last decade and reshape the entire global economy.
It could also trigger the eventual break-up of Opec, the group of mainly Middle East producers, which due to its control of 60pc of the world’s petroleum reserves has often been accused of acting like a cartel.
Even worse, some experts warn that a prolonged period of lower oil prices could reshape the entire political map of the Middle East, triggering a new wave of political uprisings in petrodollar sheikhdoms in the Persian Gulf, which depend on the income from crude to underwrite their high levels of public spending and support less wealthy client states in the Arab world.
“We are now entering a new era in world oil and we will have lower prices for some time to come,” says Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Quest: Energy Security and the Remaking of the Modern World. “Oil was really the last commodity in the super-cycle to remain standing.”
“The oil market is being redefined by two factors. Firstly, the astonishing growth in US oil production, which is real and dynamic. Secondly, the realisation that the world economy is much weaker that was previously expected so demand is being squeezed,” says Mr Yergin, who also sits on the US Secretary of Energy Advisory Board.
Lifting the ban on US crude oil exports, which first came into force in the 1970s to ensure energy security, is becoming an evermore likely move by Washington as it seeks to apply pressure on Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to back down over Ukraine. According to the energy advisers IHS, such a move would further stimulate growth in domestic production and cut America’s existing import bill by $67bn,
Opec owes its existence to a period of great economic and political upheaval in the 1960s, when demand for crude oil began to surge from rapidly growing industrialised economies and producing countries in the Middle East started to emerge as newly independent states.
Created in Baghdad by five original members including Saudi, Iraq and Venezuela, the organisation offered the first real counterbalance to the so-called “seven sisters” of international oil companies such as Shell and BP, which had dominated global supply up to that time.
This is 2014..not the 60's or 70's. Policy made then is seriously out-of-date. The desert rats have dominated enough and the middle East continues to remain unstable as it has for a thousand plus years. Let them pound sand..and throw it at each other. The money purse fuels dictators, factions, warlords and other screw-balls. How well has that worked out?
Gas here has dropped 22% to around $2.55/ga. I like it when my money goes farther. So does everyone else, save the meanie-greenies and oil-haters. Let them walk and pound sand as well.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/39a42c92-69af-11e4-8f4f-00144feabdc0.html
Quote:
The share of US imports of crude oil from Opec nations are at their lowest level in almost 30 years, underlining the impact of the shale revolution on global trade flows.
The lower dependence on imports from the cartel, which pumps a third of the world’s crude, comes amid advances in hydraulic fracturing that has propelled domestic US production to about 9m barrels a day – the highest level since the mid-1980s.
n August, Opec’s share of US crude oil imports dropped to 40 per cent – accounting for 2.9m b/d – the lowest since May 1985, according to Financial Times analysis of US Department of Energy data. At its 1976 peak it stood at about 88 per cent.
The decline in US appetite for foreign oil, alongside expanding eastern demand, has meant producers from the Middle East, west Africa and Latin America have turned towards Asia.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/11/23/uk-opec-meeting-iran-saudi-idUKKCN0J70NY20141123
Quote:
(Reuters) - Iran will try to persuade Saudi Arabia to cut oil production when the oil ministers from the two OPEC members meet this week in Vienna, Iran's semi-official Mehr news agency reported on Sunday citing a television interview with the country's oil minister.
Iran has said the steep fall in oil prices this year is the result of deliberate moves by some exporters which have kept production high to undermine Tehran's sanctions-hit economy.
The country is struggling to offset a wide budget imbalance created by the drop in oil prices.
Let the gulf widen further...payback is a $%^&#!, isn't it?
