My year 1988 was dominated by my mandatory spell of military service in Austria. It was also some form of rupture in my life as my world would never be the same after it. I shook off the shackles of…

Look wherever you want, you are swamped by stories on the LNG wave that’s about to hit Europe. After almost a decade of neglect, Europe has become the powerhouse of global LNG trade again not because of its vanilla qualities…

When I talked to a friend the other morning, he told me that gas was the most important fuel for power generation in Japan. I brought him up to speed on the fact that not LNG but rather coal is…

Everyone who has touched upon trading – as the term is understood today – very quickly falls victim to the impression that this casino is the real economy. And that indices, charts, KPIs, and financial market performance are all that…

OK, we got it by now. In an unfathomable show of splendor, OPEC has congregated in Algiers to show the world that it still matters and that finally, after a zillion attempts and a lot of trepidation (that’s what it…

In 2005, the Natural Gas world looked at North America to become the El Dorado for all LNG exporters. Natural gas prices in the US were sky-high, reserves were dwindling, and demand ever growing. It resulted in an LNG bonanza…

It’s one of the most commented topics of the last couple of years. Will Russia provide Europe with all the gas it needs – and whenever the discussion heats up, it veers off into the political realm? I won’t comment…

The vast majority of those reading those lines have enjoyed some form of schooling – a time when elementary education was meted out to make those unruly, pesky, adorable sweet little beings we were at birth a commodity. Future employers…

Now that even the most bull-headed traders have understood that high-price LNG and the seller’s 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…

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?”.…

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…

More than 2000 years ago, before the dawn of the Roman Empire, you would have been forgiven for thinking that the island world of the Eastern Mediterranean was the center of the world. Some of the most illustrious empires either…

Three and a half years ago I wrote about the Black Mamba. That’s a phenomenon under which a project has overspent to get itself built and suddenly that market does not provide the kind of returns needed to allow for…

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…

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…

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 endeavors in potential consuming markets. Either way, we are…