One of the problems in trying to project future demand and supply of oil and the other fossil fuels is that the decisions on their availability and use are often…
We see endless fighting between the Democrats and Republicans about the budget, but no real explanation as to what the issues are. My view is that there is a structural…
We know that 2011 began with a rocky start – the Middle East uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya turned the status quo upside down, the sovereign debt of European…
A research team including colleagues at UC Davis, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Shell Projects & Technology is offering a new computational study published in the Proceedings of the…
Global clean energy investment in the first three months of 2011 totalled $31.1 billion, a 34% slump on the previous quarter and down 10% on the corresponding period last year,…
Will electric cars ever become the common way to drive? What is needed is an infrastructure that allows easy recharging of the vehicle (such as gasoline stations are for the…
F. Scott Fitzgerald supposedly told Ernest Hemingway, “The rich are different from you and me.” And Hemingway supposedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.” Engineers are different from the rest…
Goldman Sachs surprised the market when the investment bank advised its clients on Monday, April 11 to liquidate the "CCCP basket" for a 25% profit. The bear call was partly…
My current scenario for global equities has them selling off over the summer, then a rebounding led by emerging markets starting sometime in the fall. In that case, you…
A research team at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland has announced they have come upon a new catalyst for electrolysis to split hydrogen out of water.…
Over the weekend, I managed to catch up with a friend of mine who just escaped from Libya by the skin of his teeth. Sent there by an oil major…
One of my recent essays discussed the relationship between high oil prices and recession. Consumers who suddenly find themselves paying more for fuel are hit with the equivalent of…
Nuclear researchers knew long ago that reactor designs now in wide use had already been bested in safety by another design. Why did the industry turn its back on that…
The puzzling differential between the price of oil in different markets seems to be persisting. For most of the last decade, there was very little difference between the price of…
No one has been more negative about the long term outlook for the Treasury bond markets than I. At the rate that we are piling on spending while chopping back…
The OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report and IEA Oil Market Report both came out on Tuesday last week and allowed us to see how events in the Middle…
Every time there is a spike in the cost of energy such as the ’73 crisis and the ’79/80 oil price spike — and then again in ‘07/08 — alternative…
I thought it worthwhile spending a post looking at the global prospects for gas shale. I am indebted to Art Berman for first bringing some of the problems to…
The overweighting of the UK stock market towards fossil fuel companies means that UK pension funds are at particular risk of any sudden reassessment of the viability of high-carbon energy…
I paid $50 to fill my tank at a gas station in Maine this morning, at a cost of almost $4 a gallon. When the Actress muttered some comment of…