Bruce Pile

Barron's Banks on $100 Oil

On one of Cramer's shows, he presented a table that listed all the times and dates that Saudi Arabia promised to increase production by a certain time and the result. All of these proclamations proved to be false. Cramer called them "serial liars". Even if they would put 500,000 bpd on the market, it likely would be heavy sour crude and would have limited bidding on it from the importers, most of whom have limited refining ability for it. The Saudis are planning to build some new refineries to handle their heavy crude, then sell refined product, which would help with oil prices. But those are not on line yet.

As for what the dollar does, the price of oil has been charted in the other major currencies, and the big climb happens there too (just a little more moderate).

What is really behind the price climb is not total oil production versus demand. It's total exported conventional crude - and this is severely lagging total production and has been falling since '05. As global peak production is approached, a much higher portion of total liquids is unconventional and consumed by the enriched producing nation (see the Export Land Model ELM). This presents two big problems few consider. The unconventional oil (oil sand, shale, deep water) all must be ground up, heated up, or manufactured with massive amounts of fossil fuel as opposed to conventional oil, which traditionally comes spewing out of the ground already made up for us and ready to put into a pipeline! This produces a net energy math problem such that you net only about 1 out of every 3 barrels added from all these sources that have EROI around 3-5. This means it takes 3 barrels of deep water or tar sands oil to replace each barrel of declining conventional crude production! Compound this with the math of ELM, and you have a much sharper decline in net energy supplied than just the total "oil" production numbers indicate. And net exported net energy is what is setting oil prices. This is becoming more and more detached from what has always been considered "oil production", but nobody seems to understand this.

Smells Good: The Case for Natural Gas

In addition to the monstrous advantages you point out for NG over oil, which to recap are:
1. Over 5 times cheaper per BTU
2. Much cleaner for the environment, thus much more likely to
get favorable legislation enacted in any energy policy
3. Redirects 700 billion dollars a year away from often
unfriendly foreign governments
you also have the basic fact that over the next 20 years or so, global gas production, and thus LNG trade, is going to be growing briskly while net exports of oil are going to be accelerating a downtrend already in place! Peak gas is projected to be around 2030 while peak oil is happening now and, more importantly, peak oil exports is probably history already. Just look at a chart of LNG trade and compare it to what net exports of oil have done over the last few years. One is rolling over into a decline per the ELM (Export Land Model) while the other is climbing sharply to a peak decades away.

Historically, there has always been a tight correlation between oil price and natural gas price because of the rampant interchangability between the two in industry. When gas lags as far behind oil is it is presently doing, there is always a sharp slingshot move in gas to catch up with what oil is doing, which usually overshoots oil briefly. This seems to happens every 3 years or so, and if it happens again, it would take the price of gas to over $25.

In addition to the usual industrial switchover activity from crude to NG, you are probably going to have a lot of transportation switchover this cycle as well (if Boone Pickens has his way, that is).
If the Clean Energy model catches on, we could see an unprecedented megacycle in NG versus crude.