After the collapse of communism in 1989, Fukuyama famously predicted the end of history. His words were some of the most egregious blunders in the predicting business as from where I am standing, history is currently making large strides. It’s hard to remember a time in my life which was so dominated by conflict. Even […]
Now that even the most bull-headed traders have understood that high price LNG and the sellers market have gone away, the game has changed. Prodigious additional amounts of LNG will hit the energy consumption world and the question of where it all shall go is burning on everyone’s mind. However, as strange as it seems, […]
Those who have seen the first installment of the famous “Hellboy” series will remember the scene where professor Broom sees Kroenen coming down the stairs and asks the all important question “I see the puppet but where is the puppet player?”. Kroenen was merely a puppet with just the modicum of a free will. The […]
More than 3 years ago I wrote about North America being the El Dorado of energy because of all those exciting developments in shale gas. In a sense, it also became the green beacon of the world as cheap gas has reduced coal usage significantly and might even sniff it out completely. On that matter […]
More than 2000 years ago, before the dawn of the Roman Empire, you would have been forgiven to think that the island world of the Eastern Mediterranean was the center of the world. Some of the most illustrious empires either had their center of power there or were bordering its shores. Today the islands of […]
Joggers know the problem. Every time you jog close to a road with a little more traffic than just an occasional vehicle, an eerie feeling creeps up on you. All this exhaust from the vehicles can sure be no good for me. Wouldn’t it be better to do our rounds in a piece of woods […]
Three and a half years ago I wrote about the Black Mamba. That’s a phenomenon under which a project has overspent in order to get itself built and suddenly that market does not provide the kind of returns needed to allow for the project to generate enough revenues for repaying investments made – with a […]
We are halfway through 2016 and Africa looks set for despair and gloom. Faltering oil prices have brought misery to many African countries that have grown dependent on the oil income and yet, there is a strong silver lining as the easy clippings from oil and gas gave all African nations the wrong sort of […]
For the longest time (about a decade or so) the LNG world was a certain place. The stuff itself was hard to get and expensive, sellers were courted at every whim and Asia paid steep premiums, which is why all efforts have been on this market plus some non-Asian exotics like Spain or Latin America. […]
The new situation we have with comparatively cheaper LNG is sharpening our senses for new opportunities. This happens out of pain experienced by the producers as well as out of opportunistic endeavor in potential consuming markets. Either way, we are all happy takers and won’t look at the teeth too much – won’t we? There […]
Last week we have seen that there is more and more oil coming online despite some problems in other oil-producing regions of the world and also despite the drop in sale oil production that is in full swing now. However, I also hinted that the real toxic problem lies somewhere else. Those who believe that […]
So, OPEC has met and decided that the world is good as it is and there is no change of strategy needed. Who is surprised here? Who is indeed expecting any shift coming from OPEC right now? They are clearly not in the driving seat anymore and if they still are in the seat, breaks […]
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 […]