oil
A topsy-turvy world for oil and gas
When it comes to offshore oil and gas drilling rigs, it’s a tale of two markets.
The market for jack-up rigs and shallow water semi-submersibles, the types of rigs used in relatively shallower water, is still taking a beating.
For example, in its l…
Oil and a double-dip recession
It is easy to forget how important sub-$40 oil prices were at the beginning of this year as the world dove into recession. If crude had been above $140 as it had been in July 2008, the combination of high oil prices and the credit crisis could have cau…
Crude pushes back toward $75
If a very minor recovery in the global economy pushes oil back toward $75, what will a robust expansion do? Crude moved to $73.79 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The reason for the rise appears to be a belief that a pick-up in business spending an…
Is oil going over $200?
One of the greatest hedge fund managers in history, Jim Rogers, insists that oil will move above $200 at some point during the bull market. He also sees the coming bubble in Treasuries bursting soon. “The U.S. government bond market will be the next …
Natural Gas Industry Braces for Impact
If the news today is an indication of things to come, the next few months are not going to be pretty. If the big boys are preparing for the worst, imagine the fear from the debt-ridden little guys.
And so it begins. Just yesterday, we here at the TFN offices got into a late-day discussion about the fate of the nation’s natural gas markets.
With prices remaining low and entirely removed from the recent commodities bonanza, the nation’s expanding natural gas drilling industry is headed for trouble.
Today we got the news that proves our theory.
ConocoPhillips (NYSE:COP), the third largest of the nation’s Big Oil players, announced it is cutting its capital spending budget by nearly 10% and is selling some $10 billion…
3 gems hiding in plain sight
This post comes from Matt Koppenheffer at partner site The Motley Fool.”I like to go for cinches. I like to shoot fish in a barrel. But I like to do it after the water has run out.” — Warren Buffett.
In an effort to track down some of the companies t…
RBA Raises Rates!
Pandora’s Box of rate hikes is opened! Is the dollar being removed from oil trades? Deficits do matter, eh? Gold heads toward its all-time high…And Now… Today’s Pfennig!
Good day… And a Terrific Tuesday to you! A Tuesday morning that is seeing a HUGE currency rally VS the dollar on the news that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) opted to go ahead and hike rates now, and not wait for November’s meeting, as I had thought they would do! WOW!
The first hike… It has opened Pandora’s Box of interest rate hikes around the world… For, if the RBA went this soon, then we can expect Norway’s Norges Bank to push their rate hike earlier on the calendar, maybe even later…
A Century of Bad Ideas
Not much happened yesterday. The Dow fell 47 points. The newspapers attributed the reversal to surprisingly low consumer confidence numbers. Apparently, consumers aren’t so sure this crisis is over. As we reported yesterday, they’re saving money… maybe even at an 8% rate.
Oil didn’t move yesterday. Neither did gold.
The Wall Street Journal reported that markets were reacting to “mixed data”.
That is to say, some reports were encouraging. Others were not. It was as if one weather forecaster called for a blizzard. The other for sunny skies and warm temperatures. Investors didn’t know how to dress.
Among the dark clouds was an item on the falloff in tax revenues. States are having a hard time balancing their books, because their tax receipts…
Who’s Buying Oil?
As the US strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) approaches capacity (721.5 million barrels filled out of a total possible 727 million, and will be filled by January 2010), the federal government will fade out of the oil-buying business. Some bearish traders believe that this factor can weigh in on prices, since most petroleum stocks in the United States are government-held rather than private. Bullish traders have also used the filling of the Chinese SPR as a reason that oil should go much higher.
The team at Casey’s Energy Opportunities believe that planned government buying or selling of crude oil for SPRs actually have very little impact in the overall market. However, an overall drawdown of worldwide inventory could put downward pressure on the…
Financial Crisis Gives Chinese Car Companies a Chance to Get Up to Speed
There’s no question that the big “winner” in the global financial crisis has been China. While for the past two years developed economies have been scrambling to keep afloat China has taken a nuanced approach to achieving its economic and political goals.
China has used depressed commodities prices to stock up on long-term supplies of raw materials such as oil, copper, and iron. And it’s used structural weakness in the U.S. financial system as justification for replacing the dollar as the world’s main reserve currency.
Now, the Red Dragon is looking to make headway on the highway by winning global market share in the automotive market while U.S. heavyweights spin out.
“We aren’t afraid of the financial crisis,” Zhou Fuquan, vice president of…
Natural Gas’ Triple Could Give Us a 416% Gain by Year-End
The past 18 months have taken a serious toll on normal supply and demand in many industries. But no industry was impacted more than energy…
Oil peaked at $147 per barrel in July 2008 — right before the house of cards came crashing down on the global economy. Once banks started to fail and credit dried up, other businesses slowed production and laid off workers. This created a massive trickle effect on the overall economy.
Big corporations and individual consumers alike were using less energy. That meant the prices of every energy-related commodity plummeted.
This spring, things started to turn around… The unemployment rate quit falling at such a rapid rate. Inventories were too low in many industries, creating a ramp up in…
The Next Great Oil Frontier
Offshore Nambia is quickly becoming one of the world’s greatest frontier oil provinces.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, a few major companies took out oil exploration concessions there from the government of South Africa. In 1974, Shell (NYSE: RDS.A / RDS.B) discovered a gas field off the southwest coast with the Kudu project. Early estimates were 1 trillion cubic feet of reserves, but current estimates range up to 10 trillion. Kudu was big, but nobody much cared about natural gas back then. Gas was too cheap, and southern Africa was too far away.
There was hardly any development around Kudu for the next 20 years. South Africa was under international sanctions due to its apartheid regime, so oil companies and other outside…
Buy Norway’s oil champion
Norway’s next oil frontier just got a little closer — and there’s only one stock to play it.
I don’t follow Norwegian politics very closely, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’ve been a little slow on the uptake.
But the re-election of Norwegian Prim…