Looking at the North Western European coastlines one can see a neat row of LNG terminals from the French Bretagne up to the Netherlands and after Denmark, it continues right into the Baltic Sea to Poland and now Lithuania. What pops out, even more, is the gaping hole made up by Germany. The biggest, and […]
Iran’s sanctions have been lifted a couple of months now and it just looks like, things are not going exactly as planned for the Iranians. My readers will remember that I predicted this outcome in mid-January this year. The reasons are many but the ONE, the big and significant reason can be summarized as “Nobody […]
About 2 years ago I was contacted in order to work on the South African energy dilemma and indeed, I immediately saw enormous potential for new, lucrative investments. The problem was pronounced and the need was clearly there. But things were by far not as easy and as obvious as one would have guessed. Let’s […]
No matter how many years I blast the message to the world, nothing got people’s attention on the shortcomings of diesel as a fuel better than the wave of excitement on Volkswagens cheatings in the US. To be sure, Volkswagen is not the only cheater here as we know well now. This affair goes far […]
Many years ago, an old sea bear and meanwhile a good friend told me that whatever you do on land gets inevitably harder when you are on the water. Space is confined and processes that have been designed for still land are exposed to all kinds of movements. This simple deduction stuck with me and […]
We are living in weird times. OPEC floods the market with crude oil in order to kill off shale as an industry and also to keep Iranians and Russians at bay. The cartel itself is under enormous strain as less wealthy members are in utter disarray, and we might even see one of them blow […]
It’s a bit obscene – for years we have watched the meteoric rise of shale oil and now, as prices have gone down dramatically the party seems to be over. Doom and gloom at big shalecorp? Not so fast. The wild story reminds me of the DotCom bubble around 2000. I was working for a […]
Here is a warning – this article is speculation as many others in this blog were so far. Indeed, everything on the future is speculation as the misfirings of our forecasters about the oil price in 2014 have shown. But sometimes, even the most outlandish speculation comes to happen. Shall we? In December 1991, the […]
In June 2014, I made a wager with a friend (here is the full story) when the price of oil was slightly above 100 USD. Let’s restate the full wager again here for the sake of clarity. I said that before March 31st, 2016, WTI would have been below USD 28.- for a minimum of […]
The last 12 months have seen 3 new LNG consumers added to the growing mix of converts to this cool energy form – Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan. All have implemented quick FSRU solutions in order to get into the LNG game and all of them are pretty classic base-load markets with otherwise pretty predictable, and […]
The mother of all battles is on in the gas industry. Don’t see it yet? Then you must be living on Mars. Gazprom certainly sees it and is rushing out to warn everyone who wants to listen – and those who don’t – that there will be no price war for gas in Europe and […]
It’s a bit late to write about Fukushima, don’t you agree? If this post would be about Fukushima it would indeed be a bit late. But the issue I am putting my teeth in here is much larger. Fukushima has become a symbol for deadly industries, for the nuclear holocaust, for the apparent fact that […]
Back in early 2012, I dashed down some thoughts I had with a client buddy onto my scratchboard. He was giving “getting himself into the LNG business” some serious thought. Here is what I told him back then: Quote: LNG is not like oil, it’s not like oil products. Not even like any commodity you […]
Free falling oil prices are blamed for much of the ills of the world – unfairly so as I pointed out many times. The low prices also hold the promise of a better, more efficient, greener, cleaner, more decentralized and more sustainable energy future. However, very high oil prices have also given birth to a […]
In the dying days of 2008, a bunch of renegade gas players congregated in Rotterdam in order to make history. Well, it was certainly not their foremost intention to make history – that was more of some sort of unintended consequences and most of them might not even have dared to dream how things would […]