Good ideas are incredibly frequent and it’s even more astonishing…

A couple of days ago I had a conversation with a trader friend…

There is a German saying. He, who does a voyage, shall have stories…

The news about the current Nigerian fuels crisis is already spreading…

In the mid Nineties, the UK transformed its gas market unleashing liberalization.…

2011 I was briefly involved in a project called AGRI - the Azerbaijan,…

So we have lived through the last OPEC meeting in Vienna holding…

There is something exciting up in the north. Its big, it’s…

I am feeling a little like in a warp bubble - don't you? Browsing…

65 million years ago, dinosaurs ruled the planet. They had conquered…

Humanity is capable of astonishing feats from making atoms visible to landing probes on saturnian moons. In business though, there are limits of what should be done - or not.

This blog is almost two years old now and I have been asked multiple…

Multiple times since I have turned into the Pitbull, I have faced…

Robert Kennedy said in a 1966 Cape town speech "There is a Chinese…

Hydrogen is often being touted the final solution to all our problems with vehicles and pollution. It does not produce CO2 (at least not directly) and for that fact alone its the darling of the tree huggers. But reality - as so very often - is much more complex. On balance hydrogen is not really the stuff you want in your tank and it comes at a very heavy price.

LNG is a fringe fuel - or it still is because we can see it becoming mainstream very fast. The old fuelling world is staging a fierce defense battle. And they will not shy back from making it real ugly to switch. But as Victor Hugo once famously said "You can't beat ideas when their time has come".

I have seen many of those plans and they have never worked. Not because they are African. This stuff cannot work if you put it in Europe or North America. Because grand Master plans generally are impossible to realize. They inherently lack flexibility, which is necessary to deal with unforeseen events or twists and turns in the market or the international energy scene.

Many African countries are oil producers but they are also beset by frequent power outages. At the same time they flare Natural Gas in huge volumes. Infrastructure to bring that gas to power plants and then further distribute electricity is weak or non existent. That could be a blessing in disguise as the continent is on the verge of an energy revolution.

Scientific chaos is not the same as your ordinary chaos. It simply means that it is impossible to predict exactly what will happen in all but the very simplest systems, even if every detail of its past and current conditions is known.

We cannot easily say that we did not try (in homeopathic doses) to wean ourselves off our addiction to imported hydrocarbons but who wants to take a reduction in lifestyle, even if that meant financing (directly or indirectly) some people that may wish to harm us. In simple words, we gave some of those who might want to kill us money - to increase their ability to do so. Plus our presence on their lands further stoked their ire. Not really smart but a reality we seemed had to live with so far. No more. The unconventional gas revolution has already done more for US national security than all nation building programs combined.