Skip to main content

Oil & energy roundup

A few articles and points to round out some of the oil and energy news that's recently been made public.

First off, Matthew Simmons provides a brief commentary on the oil supply/demand picture going forward. In "Underestimating Demand, Overestimating Supply", Simmons declares that the experts' estimates of world oil supply and demand have been proved totally wrong:

In retrospect, the best way to review key fundamentals is to look carefully at changes in global supply and demand, and where they’ve come from. Between 1991 and 2005, global demand for oil grew by 16.6 million b/d. More astonishing is that non-FSU demand grew from 58.9 million b/d in 1991 to 79.8 million barrels a day in 2005. In other words, outside the unanticipated collapse of the Former Soviet Union, the rest of the world's oil demand grew by 20.9 million barrels a day in just 14 years (35%; 2.5% per year) vs. the projection by many oil pundits that oil demand growth was certainly slowing down.

Further work by the Peak Oil Review Editors shows that "total supply gain in Russia and China was offset by the increased domestic consumption in those two countries". As those countries reach peak production sometime in the next decade, will the other oil producing countries be able to generate major increases and keep supply growing? See the above link for more.

You might remember the post earlier this week about the recent Gulf of Mexico oil discovery. Randy Kirk makes a few points regarding this discovery in the article, "Clarification of the Huge Chevron Oil Discovery", at Energy Bulletin. In fact, Mr. Kirk points out that the discovery may have more impact on the natural gas market than oil. Check it out.

In renewable energy news, solar panel manufacturers continue to struggle through the polysilicon shortage. For more on how solar companies are coping with a scarcity for one of their essential components, see "Solar World: Desperately seeking silicon". That link brought to us by the theoildrum.com in their September 8 edition of DrumBeat.

For more on advances in solar panel manufacturing and a great many other alternative energy items, see The Energy Blog, another great site.

Popular posts from this blog

Clean Money - John Rubino: Book review

Clean Money by John Rubino 274 pages. Hoboken, New Jersey John Wiley & Sons. 2009. 1st Edition. The bouyant stock market environment of the past several years is gone, and the financial wreckage of 2008 is still sharp in our minds as a new year starts to unfold. Given the recent across-the-board-declines in global stock markets (and most asset classes) that have left many investors shell-shocked, you might wonder if there is any good reason to consider the merits of a hot new investment theme, such as clean energy. However, we shouldn't be too hasty to write off all future stock investments. After all, the market declines of 2008 may continue into 2009, but they may also leave interesting investment opportunities in their wake. Which brings us to the subject of this review. John Rubino, author and editor of GreenStockInvesting.com , recently released a new book on renewable energy and clean-tech investing entitled, Clean Money: Picking Winners in the Green Tech Boom . In Clean

Slate profiles Victor Niederhoffer

Slate's recent profile of writer/speculator, Vic Niederhoffer has been getting some attention from traders and finance types in recent days. I thought we'd take a look at it here too, to offer up some possible educational value from Vic's experiences with trading and loss. Here's an excerpt from Slate's profile of Victor Niederhoffer : " I've enjoyed getting your e-mails. It sounds like you've thought a lot about being wrong. Well, the reason you contacted me, to call a spade a spade, is that I'm sort of infamous for having made a big, notorious, terrible error not once but twice in my market career. Let's talk about those errors. The first was your investment in the Thai baht, which pretty much wiped you out when the Thai stock market crashed in 1997. I made so many errors there it's pathetic. I made one of my favorite errors: "The mouse with one hole is quickly cornered." That is key. There are certain decisions you make in li

Seth Klarman: Margin of Safety (pdf)

Welcome, readers! Signup for free email updates at the Finance Trends Newsletter . Update: PDF links removed due to DMCA notice. Please see our extensive Klarman book notes below. New visitors, please check the Finance Trends home page for all new posts. Here's something for anyone who has been trying to get a look at Seth Klarman's now famous, and out of print, 1991 investment book, Margin of Safety .  My knowledge of value investing is pretty much limited to what I've read in Ben Graham's The Intelligent Investor (the book which originally popularized the investment concept of a "Margin of Safety"), so check out the wisdom from Seth Klarman and other investing greats in our related posts below. You can also go straight to Ronald Redfield's Margin of Safety book notes .    Related posts: 1. Seth Klarman interviews and Margin of Safety notes     2. Seth Klarman: Lessons from 2008 3. Investing Lessons from Sir John Templeton 4.