Kurt Cobb

Latest articles from Kurt

• Why Wireless Charging Is A Waste Of Energy

  Published 13 August 2020 | viewed 2,824 times

  It turns out the cellphone industry believes its customers just can't be bothered with setting their phones in charging cradles or worse yet, actually plugging…

• Wall Street’s Big Coronavirus Mistake

  Published 16 March 2020 | viewed 43,056 times

  Investment professionals on Wall Street spend their days reading financial reports and looking at numbers flash on screens. These numbers record the moment-to-moment changes in…

• The Rise Of Resource Nationalism

  Published 26 February 2020 | viewed 7,073 times

  It wasn't supposed to be this way. The fall of the Berlin Wall was to bring about one, integrated world market where goods and services freely…

• Peak Shale Could Spark An Offshore Drilling Boom

  Published 10 February 2020 | viewed 24,171 times

  John Hess, CEO of Hess Corporation, a large U.S.-based independent oil producer, recently told a Houston audience where he's putting the company's money these days: Offshore…

• The Real Reason The U.S. Is Interested In Iran

  Published 07 January 2020 | viewed 71,892 times

  The American obsession with Iran is about oil and natural gas. If these two resources had been absent, it is hard to imagine such an…

• The Glaring Problem With Ocean Floor Mining

  Published 24 December 2019 | viewed 26,319 times

  A recent article on undersea mining in The Atlantic brought back a detailed childhood memory. When I was in fifth grade, my class put on a sort of…

• The Unintended Consequences Of Qatar’s Outdoor Air Conditioning

  Published 12 November 2019 | viewed 12,491 times

  Qatar is both a country and a peninsula that juts out about 100 miles into the Persian Gulf. It is precisely this geography which makes…

• The Oil Mystery Undermining An Aramco IPO

  Published 28 October 2019 | viewed 16,039 times

  It's what you can't see—the oil beneath the Arabian sands—that potential investors in Saudi Aramco's on-again, off-again initial public offering (IPO) ought to focus on.…

• Greed Or Incompetence: What’s Behind The California Power Cuts?

  Published 14 October 2019 | viewed 8,899 times

  Most of the news surrounding the electricity shutoffs in California—done to avert the ignition of additional wildfires by aging electrical infrastructure—has focused on two things:…

• Can Oil Survive The Looming Economic “Ice Age?”

  Published 13 September 2019 | viewed 7,596 times

  Albert Edwards turned bearish on stocks back in 1996—well, not exactly bearish, but cautious. He recommended to clients that they overweight long-term, high-quality bonds and…

• Will Shale Rise From The Dead?

  Published 12 August 2019 | viewed 49,816 times

  A flurry of coverage about the gloom and outright calamity in the shale oil business appeared last week. Low prices continue to dog the industry.…

• The Dark Side Of The Digital Revolution In Energy

  Published 08 July 2019 | viewed 6,572 times

  The U.S. Senate passed a bill last week that would form a government-industry working group to "examine ways to replace automated systems with low-tech redundancies, like manual…

• Shale Industry Has Destroyed 80% Of Its Value Since 2008

  Published 04 July 2019 | viewed 18,241 times

  Recently, the former CEO of the largest shale gas producer in the United States told a roomful of conference goers what any competent financial analysis would…

• IEA: CO2 Levels Hit Another Record High

  Published 27 May 2019 | viewed 17,867 times

  When the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported in late March that energy consumption in 2018 rose at the fastest rate in a decade, it confirmed…

• The World’s Most Unorthodox Oil Nation

  Published 15 April 2019 | viewed 10,778 times

  In what seemed like an episode of the Norwegian television drama Occupied, Norway's largest political party joined smaller ones in the nation's parliament to prevent oil…

• Can Anything Slow Down U.S. LNG?

  Published 07 February 2019 | viewed 22,095 times

  It is the legally mandated purpose of a for-profit corporation to make money for its owners and to prioritize that goal above all else. So,…

• Is The Permian Bull Run Coming To An End?

  Published 28 January 2019 | viewed 35,509 times

  The bad news coming out of the shale oil fields of America could all be put down to slumping oil prices. That is certainly a…

• Can U.S. Shale Overcome Its Cash Flow Problem?

  Published 01 November 2018 | viewed 21,054 times

  I'm tempted to say the following to the writers of two recent pieces (here and here) outlining the continuing negative free cash flow of companies fracking for…

• Was The Aramco IPO Destined To Fail?

  Published 01 August 2018 | viewed 20,558 times

  Since late 2016 the financial media has been abuzz about what would likely be the biggest initial public offering (IPO) ever: The sale of 5…

• Is The Oil Industry Repeating A Critical Error

  Published 14 July 2018 | viewed 103,234 times

  Ten years ago this week—July 11, 2008 to be exact—the price of a barrel of oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange hit an intraday high…