100 years ago, schools for mentally handicapped children were called “Institutions for the imbecile and the mentally deficient”. Our vocabulary has prettied up somewhat since those sinister days whenever we deal with other humans, those that are different from what…
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…
About 2 years ago I was contacted 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 there. But things were by far…
No matter how many years I blasted 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 Volkswagen cheating in the US. To be sure, Volkswagen…
Many years ago, an old sea bear and a good friend told me that whatever you do on land is inevitably harder when you are on the water. Space is confined and processes designed for still land are exposed to…
We are living in weird times. OPEC floods the market with crude oil to kill off shale as an industry and keep Iranians and Russians at bay. The cartel itself is under enormous strain as less wealthy members are in…
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…
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…
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…
It’s a part of popular science today. One day the human race would leave planet Earth and go to other places and to make them a little more palatable to our balmy needs, we would terraform those places. There are…