maximax

Oil Manipulations Exposed

The speculator witch hunt is on again, and here we have another useless article on seekingalpha, with many alarmingly ignorant comments. Many if not all of the fallacies the author indulges in were already dispelled in other articles or comments, especially to earlier articles written by the same author. Whose agenda is this author pushing? I am wondering if there are special interest groups that pay people to spam a seemingly professional forum like seekingalpha with this nonsense. The author seems to have little knowledge of oil, as can be seen among other things by the sources he cites. The oil industry is highly secretive, and what data there is in the public is to a large extent of poor quality. Even with inside experience it is tricky to call the market.

Yes, OPEC producers publish either no or wrong export stats for exactly the reason nerfer stated. This is one of the more well known "secrets" in oil and if that's news to you then you might want to reserve your views on oil until better knowledge of the market is established.

These monthly Middle Eastern export stats available with only a short time lag are usually derived from tanker movements. But shipping is no less secretive than oil and the data is probably even worse. The movements data is not of good quality, and I have first hand experience with it (it may work well for certain individual vessels but on the grand scale it is poor). Annual exports stats may have been reworked from import stats of the receiver countries, but trade stats are also problematic, and are revised for years to come.

And that Russian abiotic oil theory is actually not completely wrong - some oil is abiotic, but that's only a very small amount, what we use on a daily basis is organic.

Sorry Greens, Fossil Fuels Are Here to Stay

This article is not forward looking. If oil shale and the like are supposed to have a strong future, then high altitude wind farms and wave power are no worse in terms of likelihood and feasibility. But the latter two were ignored in the article, possibly because they are not only available 25% of the time, and thus do not fit the agenda. Or maybe they do. Personally I would not (yet!) put my money in these companies either, as the technology is not yet very mature (although it works in principle). These remarks about keeping radioactive waste in the backyard and that the emissions from nuclear energy generation fit into a 16-metre cube, were it to produce the same amount of energy as fossil fuels, do not exactly promote the authors qualifications (e.g. converting uranium into usable fuel is energy intensive).

But ethanol is indeed mostly a cul de sac, and alternative energy is a risky area for investment, especially when compared to traditional energy sectors, were high oil prices in the short to medium term are bound to produce interesting investment opportunities (prob the same with coal and gas prices).