Muskiness

I don't see how the ban made much sense to begin with, there are different types of oil so it makes sense to export the stuff you don't need to import the stuff you do need

-Lasse

It's not clear for how long, but they can't do this forever. Figure four or five more years, probably. Meanwhile, prices are creeping back up.

China's pretty large so it's a safe bet there is. The bullet is on getting rid of coal so there's more emphasis on gas there.

I don't know how China can engineer the mix of companies in the US that have formed spontaneously. People think of the majors, but they're not a large part of the process, they just play a very specific role and the smaller companies are where innovation comes from.

The only way it works here is that companies are winners and losers during cycles. The losers sell to the winners, which reinforces efficiency.

Ayup. It's something else.

They probably won't creep up much, what with fracking and conservation and Iran back in the market. And simultaneously the Saudis are hemorrhaging cash. And they have a population that's not used to working. This will be interesting.

The North Sea oil world is in trouble.

And the Nordic workers' paradises are fueled by North Sea oil, too.

Not at $30-$40/bbl.

Plus it may not necessarily be where you need it, and pipelines are expensive as well as a nightmare to get approved.

--sp

The US is kind of an outlier in mineral ownership- in most countries the state holds all mineral rights (the Queen, the federal government whatever) and dispenses licenses & collects royalties.

I believe that's one reason why fracking has not been as enthusiastically embraced in, say, the UK. There isn't enough incentive to silence the NIMBYs.

--sp

Out West, they shoot'em

Your misinformation aside, I have to thank you for pointing me to the model 3. This car finally has enough range for me to consider owning one. Once I find a little more info on things like the warranty, I expect I will be reserving one. I'm sorry I'll have to wait until 2017 or 2018 to get one.

Hmmmm... why would we be pumping oil for export when we have paid so much for all that oil we have pumped *into* the ground for the "strategic oil reserve"? Wouldn't we accomplish the same thing to simply not pump the oil from the wells to begin with?

Seems like the pipelines are a red herring. We have to run pipelines no matter the source of the oil don't we?

They'll creep back up - they always do.

but work at what? There's just not much there.

chances are they'll flywheel through it.

Europe/Britain have to give the Green Party a seat at the table and this means no fracking. Britain and the Nordics have grandfathering of North Sea operations so they're not totally dependent on tankers.

Long term, this is fairly wise ( the longer it all stays in the ground, the better the price will probably be ) but short term, at least the farther East you go, the more it means embracing Gazprom.

SFAIK, Larry Nichols of Devon knows as much about this as anybody, and nobody's doing a proper job of calling him a liar.

Tim Worstall has written about fracking - it turns a nominally extractive process into something more closely approximating an industrial process, at least in terms of finance and lag.

That's the problem. They will probably try something like forming a Saudi Silicon Valley, call it Sand Valley or something, and mess it up.

Oil is a curse to places that have nothing else. Cheap oil is great for most of the USA, but it's terrible for Venezuela and the arab states and Russia.

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-Lasse

Do you understand NIMBY?

Fracking has changed everything. It's put a ceiling on the price. It's made the demand curve very non-linear with a big flat spot at the cost of getting fracked oil out of the ground. The Saudis may put the wildcaters that drilled the wells out of business but the banks will turn around and sell the working wells to the next generation (likely large oil companies). The cat is out of the bag.

That's exactly the point.

Huh?

During the great 70's oil crisis, people in Louisiana had a bumper sticker that said

LET THE BASTARDS FREEZE IN THE DARK

Cool. Concentrated natural resources are naturally confiscated by (and create) a corrupt government. Diverse, distributed resources don't. The best distributed resource is hard-working, talented people. Compare Taiwan to Venezuela.

Some places, like Cuba, manage to have few natural resources but are a mess anyhow.

Right. The only way the Saudis can kill fracking is by keeping the price of oil down, until they run out.

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there also that if all the needs are covered by an easily available resourc e there is little encouragement to develop other resources

-Lasse