nerfer

The Self-Defeating Oil Surge

For geothermal - don't forget the major player in the U.S, Ormat (ORA). This is an overlooked field I think.

But don't confuse solar and wind (or geothermal) as an immediate replacement for oil - transportation sector will first need electric vehicles, since most alternative energies don't produce gasoline or gas replacements. (And fuel cells are off in the distant future with nuclear fusion).

The Self-Defeating Oil Surge

Goldman Sachs predictions are a lot more accurate than the government's own EIA dept. This is same and different from the 1970's. In the 70's we suddenly depended on rising imports from OPEC which was taxing their infrastructure improvements, so we depended on them and they saw an easy way to bring us to our knees. But that time it was politically motivated. This time fields are depleting and new fields being brought online are just replacing the declining production from existing fields. For the first time, supply doesn't meet demand, so price rapidly increases (it's not linear when people will pay whatever they need to in order to get to work - called 'inelastic' demand in macroeconomics 101). Doesn't take 50% increase in demand for 50% increase in price.

Iraq's reserves don't mean squat if they can't keep pipelines to the ports open. OPECs reserves in general are suspect since they were used to determine nation's quotas and were artificially generated. There's oil still out there, but it's not the easy, safe oil anymore in the volumes we need. We're more and more dependent on unstable leaders and inhospitable drilling environments as the best sources are being depleted.

Oil prices might decline to the $90 level before resuming their upward march, but we will never ever see $35-$50 oil again in our lifetime.