05.30.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: This Is A Full Societal Breakdown
MN Gordon

This week’s standard refrain was one of pessimism.  The quick return to economic health mantra that was popular not long ago has disappeared faster than you can say lickety-split.  But there was one notable outlier this week.  In fact, one leading economist stepped forward with assurances that renewed prosperity lays just ahead. On Wednesday, Nobel prize economist Paul Krugman looked up from his liquidity trap graphs long enough to tell Noah Smith at Bloomberg that the 1979-82 economic slump “would suggest fast recovery once the virus is contained.  I don’t see the case for a multiyear depression.” Read More

05.29.20- Oil Is Unlikely To Go Much Higher
Nick Cunningham

Oil prices have climbed nearly uninterrupted since late April, but the gains could be coming to an end.  On Friday, oil prices fell sharply, hitting the pause button on a rally that saw WTI rebound from -$37 per barrel on April 20, to nearly $34 per barrel on May 21, a more than $70-per-barrel swing in just a few weeks. Of course, the plunge deep into negative territory was likely a unique, one-off phenomenon. Nevertheless, the rally back into (positive) $30 territory has been impressive. 

Of note, China’s oil demand has climbed back to about 13 million barrels per day (mb/d), a swift rebound that undergirded improving market sentiment. With China’s demand back to about 90 percent of pre-pandemic levels, oil traders are clearly holding out hopes of a quick rebound elsewhere. Read More

05.28.20- From Boom Town To Ghost Town: Texas Grapples With Low Oil Prices
Haley Zaremba

Times are tough in the Permian Basin. The massive shale play that stretches across West Texas and southeastern New Mexico has gone from boom to bust in a swift downturn that began even before the spread of the novel coronavirus. The gushing Permian Basin created a shale revolution and jettisoned the United States to the top of the world’s oil-producing charts, surpassing even Saudi Arabia, but production has been slowing down over the last couple of years. “The nature of shale wells is that the decline in production much more rapidly than conventional wells, leading to inevitable slowdowns such as what we are currently witnessing in the once almighty Permian,” Oilprice reported last September. But while the U.S. shale industry was already in decline, the COVID-19 pandemic may just be the sector’s coup de gras. Read More

05.27.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: The Coin-Toss Election
James Rickards

The political climate is fragile and feverish, with the nation amid a crisis that is both fast-changing and unparalleled in living memory.

The biggest change in my election forecast is that Trump’s chances of reelection in November have plunged from 74% (the pre-COVID forecast) to 50% as of today.

This does not mean Trump will lose; he could very well win. But it will be a very close election. Deciding the outcome between Trump and Biden as of now is basically a coin toss. Many factors, some foreseeable and some unforeseen, could tip the balance. Read More

05.26.20- Floating ocean platform harvests wind, solar and wave energy
Loz Blain

German company Sinn Power has proposed a hybrid offshore power generation platform that combines wind turbines, solar panels and wave energy harvesters to generate off-grid electricity for people living close to the coast.

It's conceived as a modular system that can be specified with any or all of these features, depending on where it's being deployed and what your power needs are. Designed to handle waves up to six meters (19.6 ft) in height, it can harvest energy from waves up to 2 m (6.5 ft) high without the platform itself moving much at all, thanks to a series of floats that move 10-ft (3-m) pushrods up and down in response to wave activity. Read More

05.25.20- And Now, for Somethng Entirely Different: Brave New Normal
CJ Hopkins

My columns haven’t been very funny recently. This one isn’t going to be any funnier. Sorry. Fascism makes me cranky.

I don’t mean the kind of fascism the corporate media and the fake Resistance have been desperately hyping for the last four years. God help me, but I’m not terribly worried about a few hundred white-supremacist morons marching around with tiki torches hollering Nazi slogans at each other, or Jewish-Mexican-American law clerks flashing “OK” signs on TV, or smirking schoolkids in MAGA hats. Read More

05.23.20- Why The Covid Crisis Is A Pivotal Moment For Renewables
Alex Kimani

The global energy and travel industries have been some of the hardest hit by the coronavirus crisis, with the energy market experiencing its biggest shock post-WWII. Widespread lockdowns have resulted in energy demand plummeting, dwarfing the decline recorded during the 2008 financial crisis. 

A new report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), based on analysis of 100 days of data, states that global energy demand in the current year is set to plunge 6% Y/Y, the equivalent of losing the entire energy demand of India. Read More

05.22.20- Oil May Never Fully Recover
From This Crisis
Irina Slav

It’s a rule of thumb among epidemiologists that every epidemic is different and could be laden with surprises. It now seems the same applies to economic crises. During the last downturn, the one that started from the subprime mortgage crisis, the hardest-hit industries were, understandably, real estate and banking. Now, it’s oil and gas in the crosshairs, and nobody knows if the industry will ever be able to recover fully. Just like the coronavirus epidemic that started in China and within two months spread all over the world forcing people to stay at home, the March OPEC+ meeting that was supposed to lead to a deeper round of production cuts ended in a price war. It couldn’t have come at a worse time, but nobody could anticipate the lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders at the time. Read More

05.21.20- Why The Future Of Oil Rests On China
Tsvetana Paraskova

The pace of oil demand recovery in China and the entire world could be shaped by China’s top policy-setting meetings, which begin on Friday to chart the course for the Chinese economy hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

The National People’s Congress (NPC), the most important policy-setting annual event in the Communist country, is expected to decide what stimulus to inject into the economy after it markedly slowed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the potential decisions for supporting infrastructure and railroads and other commodity-intensive sectors could drive up China’s demand for crude oil, fuels, and other commodities, including steel and copper, according to Bloomberg News. Read More

05.20.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Trump Derangement vs. Trump Enablement
Donald Jeffries

As the world continues its draconian slide through the plandemic psyop, our country has divided itself firmly into two misguided camps. As has been the case since the election of Donald Trump, that division is centered around his impossibly cartoonish personality.

Those who suffer from the very real Trump Derangement Syndrome disorder have taken the side of the virus, clinging to it like desperate leeches. They are emotionally invested in the virus, and in the medical and scientific “experts” who promote its dangers, and advocate more authoritarian means to combat it. Read More

05.19.20- Is Hydrogen The Jet Fuel Of The Future?
Irina Slav

Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, has been touted as a superior alternative to lithium-ion batteries in cars, but adoption has been painfully slow. For all the hype, one would think most cars would be running on hydrogen already, yet they are not.  So where are hydrogen proponents going wrong?

According to some, they may be focusing on the wrong sort of vehicles to power with hydrogen. True, there are billions of passenger cars on the roads around the world. But there are also millions of aircraft in the skies – or there used to be. The aviation sector may well be the game-changer for hydrogen. Read More

05.18.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Those Who Planned the Enslavement of Mankind Warn of "A Dark Winter" for Us
Mac Slavo

The elitists who planned this scamdemic from the beginning are now warning us that we are going to face a “dark winter.” This is not about health and hasn’t been from the beginning.  This is about control and they are trying to use fear to manufacture your consent to enslavement. Do not fall for it.

Straight from the biggest player in propaganda and fake news, CNN,comes an article designed to terrify.  It says Rick Bright has warned Congress of the “darkest winter in modern history” without a ramped up coronavirus response. Meaning, unless you submit to even more tyranny and fully enslave yourselves to the ruling class, it’ll be “dark winter.”  The lies coming from CNN it’s contributions are unbelievable at this point.  Do not let these puppets of the tyrannical ruling class scare you anymore. Read More

05.16.20- The Holy Grail Of
Electric Vehicle Charging
Alex Kimani

For all their hype and techno-wizardry, EVs still bow down to their gas-powered cousins when it comes to driving range, not to mention that they take much longer to refuel. But what if you could not only charge your EV wirelessly but also be able to do it on the fly? Suddenly, the EV glass ceiling would be forever shattered, leaving piston heads green with envy. That’s why a new technology that allows EV drivers to recharge their batteries on the go is bound to thrill EV buffs everywhere.

Stanford University researchers have unveiled a wireless charging technology that employs magnetism to seamlessly charge EVs, drones, and robots during operation.  Read More

05.15.20- Fragile Oil Markets Under Threat From 50 Million Barrels Of Saudi Crude
Irina Slav

Some 50 million barrels of Saudi crude oil are approaching U.S. shores just as the Energy Information Administration reported the first inventory decline in months. This, according to Bloomberg, could reverse a tentative recovery in oil prices.

On Wednesday, the EIA reported that commercial crude oil inventories had declined by some 700,000 barrels in the week to May 8. The modest draw gave hope that the oil storage problem may soon begin to resolve itself even if total stockpiles were still above the five-year average for the season. Read More

05.14.20- Oil glut closes Middle East’s largest crude terminal
Anthony Di Paola and Verity Ratcliff

DUBAI (Bloomberg) - With the coronavirus choking fuel demand and the world awash in surplus crude, even the Middle East’s main oil-trading hub has run out of room to store unwanted barrels.

Terminal operators at Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates say they’re turning down requests from traders and refiners to store crude and refined products, whereas a year ago they had ample space. The port’s 14 million barrels of commercial crude-storage capacity is just a fraction of what Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi provide for their state oil companies. Read More

05.13.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Differeny: Why Does The Mainstream Media Seem So Desperate To Keep The COVID-19
Lockdowns Going?
Michael Snyder

Something doesn’t smell right.  The number of newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. each day has been declining, as has the number of deaths.  This is great news, and we should be hoping that the falling numbers are a sign that the pandemic is beginning to subside.  But the mainstream media has been relentlessly pumping out stories that warn of “disaster” if the lockdowns are lifted “too soon”.  According to the mainstream media, by “ignoring science” we are inviting a “second wave” which will be even deadlier than the first one.  Read More

05.12.20- Trump’s Corn Crisis Is Back
Nick Cunningham

A bipartisan group of two dozen U.S. Senators sent a letter to President Trump, urging him to reject the demands of the oil refining industry, which has called for exemptions to biofuel blending requirements.  It’s the latest chapter in a perennial war between ethanol producers, corn growers, and politicians from the Midwest on the one hand, and oil refiners and their allies from the Gulf Coast and Pennsylvania on the other. 

The global pandemic and the collapse of oil prices has devastated both sides. Demand for ethanol tracks gasoline consumption, so the steep drop in fuel consumption has hit ethanol producers very hard. But refiners are also curtailing processing and shutting down some facilities temporarily as demand has fallen off of a cliff. Read More

05.11.20- Are Diamonds The Answer To Our Nuclear Waste Problem?
Haley Zaremba

Nuclear energy is often touted as an answer to climate change for its potential as an efficient means of energy production in a decarbonized energy industry of the future. We already have nuclear energy infrastructure around the world, it releases no greenhouse gases, and it’s a potent means of energy generation, but nuclear is still a hard sell in much of the world.  This is in part due to high profile nuclear disasters, such as Three Mile Island, Fukushima, and Chernobyl, which loom large in the public consciousness. It’s also due to the fact that spent nuclear fuel, while it doesn’t contribute any greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, is nevertheless a huge hazard to public health and safety, as it stays radioactive for many, many more generations than will benefit from the energy it produces. Read More

05.09.20- THE END OF A U.S. OIL GIANT: ExxonMobil’s Days Are Numbered
Steve St Angelo

ExxonMobil, the largest oil company in the U.S. and a direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, days are numbered.  The once-great profitable oil giant is now borrowing money just to pay dividends.  How long can this charade go on?

Good question.  Now, some may believe that ExxonMobil was forced to borrow money to pay dividends due to the collapse in oil prices as a result of the global contagion.   However, the company hasn’t been able to pay shareholder dividends from its cash from operations over the past four quarters, even with much higher oil prices. Read More

05.08.20- Why This Oil Rally Won't Last
Nick Cunningham

Oil prices have rallied as traders believe the depths of demand destruction may be coming to an end with economies beginning to reopen. But some analysts are warning that the oil price rally may be premature.

WTI prices have doubled from $12 to $24 in a little over a week. There is evidence that demand has bottomed out and has begun to rise from recent lows. U.S. gasoline demand has ticked up for two consecutive weeks, rising from 5.31 million barrels per day (mb/d) in mid-April to 6.66 mb/d on May 1.  Read More

05.07.20- "Artificial leaf" device turns water and sunlight into hydrogen fuel
Michael Irving

Researchers from Rice University have built a simple new solar-powered device that can create hydrogen for fuel by splitting water. The system is very similar to other “artificial leaf” designs, but the team says it’s self-sufficient and relatively cheap to produce.

The system is made up of a perovskite solar cell, hooked up to electrodes made of a catalyst that electrolyzes the water. When sunlight hits the solar cell, it produces electricity that powers the catalyst, which then splits the water into oxygen and hydrogen. These bubble up to the surface where they can be collected for use.  Read More

05.06.20- Could Renewable Spending Solve The Unemployment Crisis In Oil?
Haley Zaremba

Last week the World Economic Forum published a report imploring the energy industry to use this unprecedented disruption of the status quo to consider building a “new energy order.” While the novel coronavirus has caused major damage (in some cases irreparably) to vast swaths of the global energy industry, this could be a great opportunity to dedicate resources, investment, and research and development into renewable energy ventures.“Though this is the worst possible way to begin a decade, the coronavirus pandemic and the collapse of oil prices also offer an opportunity to consider unorthodox intervention in the energy markets and global collaboration to support the recovery phase once the acute crisis subsides,” stated the World Economic Forum. Read More

05.05.20- World-first "impossible" rotating detonation engine fires up
Loz Blain

A Florida team working with the US Air Force claims that it's built and tested an experimental model of a rotating detonation rocket engine, which uses spinning explosions inside a ring channel to create super-efficient thrust.

The vast majority of engines, of course, use combustion rather than detonation to achieve their output goals. Combustion is a relatively slow and controlled process resulting from the reaction between fuel and oxygen at high temperatures, and it's very well understood and mature as a technology. Read More

05.04.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Beware of Tyranny More Than Covid-19
Steve Apfel 

To fight a pandemic responsible for fewer deaths than the Asian flu of 1957­–58, we've been schooled to think and behave like the abject oppressed of North Korea.

• We let bureaucrats decide for us what businesses are more important than others to society.
  
  
• Without a squeak we acquiesce to being put under de facto house arrest.  Read More

05.02.20- The Next Perovskite Solar Breakthrough Could Give Us Endless Energy By 2025
Alex Kimani

Harnessing the motherlode of the sun’s power is almost within our reach. 

The sun, our primary source of energy, bathes our Blue Planet in more solar energy than we can ever hope to reasonably use. Each hour, the sun sends 430 quintillion Joules of energy our way, more than the 410 quintillion Joules that humans consume in a whole year. With the sun likely to be around for another five billion years or so, we have a virtually unlimited source of energy--if only we could tap it efficiently. Read More

05.01.20- Fleet Of 28 Saudi Oil Tankers Could Send U.S. Oil Prices Crashing In May
Rystad Energy

With the Covid-19 pandemic reducing global oil demand by devastating numbers, oil storages are filling quickly in the US, forcing producers to start shutting output in the country and creating a big tanker congestion on its coasts. A Rystad Energy analysis reveals that 28 tankers with Saudi oil, including 14 VLCCs and carrying a total of 43 million barrels, will arrive on the US Gulf and West coasts between 24 April and 24 May. Read More

04.30.20- Rare metalloid quadruples lifespan of lithium-sulfur batteries
Nick Lavars

A device used by University of Texas at Austin researchers to test a new lithium-sulfur battery, which offered a four-fold increase in lifespan over conventional designs 

Lithium-ion batteries are the backbone of modern energy storage in consumer devices, but there are alternatives in the pipeline that could offer us considerable advantages moving forward. Among the candidates are lithium-sulfur batteries, which can hold many times the energy of their lithium-ion counterparts but quickly degrade and die. Scientists at University of Texas at Austin have devised a solution to this problem, integrating a protective layer that enables the lithium-sulfur battery to last four times longer. Read More

04.29.20- Are Solar Windows The Next Big Renewable Breakthrough?
Irina Slav

Windows that let in light and produce electricity at the same time: a recipe for a perfect life and an idea as fascinating as unattainable. At least until recently. Making a thin solar-cell film to stick on a window glass is easy enough. Making it convert sunlight into electricity at any meaningful level of efficiency was the hard part. And now scientists from Australia say they’ve cracked it.

The team, led by materials chemistry professor Jacek Jasieniak, developed a new kind of semi-transparent solar cell that featured one important difference from other semi-transparent cells: they had a component replaced with an organic conductor that can be transformed into a polymer, much more stable than the original—and common—solar cell component. Read More

04.28.20- $110 Trillion Renewables Stimulus Package Could Create 50 Million Jobs
Alex Kimani

As the world continues to grapple with the worst global pandemic in living memory, economists everywhere are warning that we are witnessing the unraveling of something far grimmer than the 2008 financial crisis: the Great Depression 2.0. 

The signs are legion: Unprecedented levels of job and capital destruction, decimated consumer spending, underperformance by nearly all major financial markets, and a breakdown in the world fiscal order. Read More

04.27.20- Oil Prices Crash 24%
As Storage Fears Mount
Matt Stoller

Oil prices look to be facing yet another harrowing Monday, with the price of WTI sliding by more than 20 percent in early morning trading.

Global oil storage is inching closer and closer to reaching its capacity, and worse, the problem is being exacerbated as more local governments across the world extending COVID-19 lockdown recommendations, weighing on crude demand. According to Goldman Sachs, global oil storage could be completely full within the next three weeks, and another dramatic crash could follow. Read More

04.25.20- First Shale Oil Domino to Fall: More to Follow
Steve St Angelo

In a stunning news release, Continental Resources, the largest shale producer in the Bakken, is shutting in most of its production in the region.  That is one hell of a lot of output to shut-in as Continental Resources was producing over 200,000 barrels per day in the Bakken at the end of 2019.

From the data on Shaleprofile.com, Continental Resources had over 2,200 wells in the North Dakota and Montana Bakken producing oil and gas during February this year.  How many wells will Continental’s Harold Hamm shut in the Bakken??  And how many will be brought back online, at to what cost, when the market recovers??  Read More

04.24.20- What Happens If Oil Storage Runs Out In The Permian?
Dwayne Purvis

Fears of running out of storage capacity drove oil prices down over $40 in single day, forcing sellers to pay their buyers to take the product, and these fears were not unfounded. Yesterday the EIA released the latest weekly installment of its authoritative data on liquid volumes stored in the United States, and the data paints an urgent picture. 

Only about 3% of the stored oil volumes have historically resided on production leases while roughly half sits upstream of refineries. Since refineries can make storage space for crude by processing it and storing it as products, the system can hold about as much more oil as refined products waiting for shipment. It is safe to assume that storage capacity is no less than its recent high, but it is not clear how much more space may exist.  Read More

04.23.20- Oil: The Storm Before
The Really Big Storm
Peter Zeihan

West Texas Intermediate, the oil grade most associated with American production, plunged down to -$40 April 20. You read the right. For a while this week, sellers had to pay people forty bucks to take a barrel of crude.

As with any product, the business of oil isn’t a once-and-done. It must be produced, shipped and processed, and then the refined product must be shipped and retailed. What happened April 20 is a bottleneck in that process. Production surged ahead of pipeline shipping capacity, leaving some producers with nowhere to put their crude. Read More

04.22.20- The Worst Is Yet To Come For Oil Prices
Nick Cunningham

Dashing hopes for some oil producers who may have thought negative prices were a weird quirk, the June WTI contract fell sharply on Tuesday.

During intraday trading June contracts collapsed by more than 45 percent, falling close to $11 per barrel. The selloff demonstrated that the ruinous supply glut is not going away, and that the meltdown for the May contract was not just a bizarre anomaly, but representative of an acute state of oversupply in North America. Read More

04.21.20- Here Is The Full Explanation Behind Today's Unprecedented Negative Oil Price
Roger Diwan

How did you end up with negative oil prices today?  This happens when a physical futures contract find no buyers close to or at expiry. 

Let me explain what that means:

A physical contract such as the NYMEX WTI has a delivery point at Cushing, OK, & date, in this occurrence May.  So people who hold the contract at the end of the trading window have to take physical delivery of the oil they bought on the futures market.  This is very rare. Read More

04.20.20- Futures Plunge As WTI Crashes By Most On Record, Tumbling To $11 Per Barrel
Tyler Durden

Oil prices crashed the most on record with the May WTI futures contract hitting its lowest level since 1999, plunging as low as $11 or down 38%, as nobody wants to take actual physical storage amid widespread fears crude storage will soon be full; meanwhile companies prepare to report the worst quarterly earnings since the financial crisis, while tens of thousands of people continue to get sick every day with the coronavirus.

While Brent was only down $1.12, or 4%, at $26.96 a barrel on Monday morning, the carnage took place in the landlocked WTI, whose May contract fell $5.70 to its lowest since March 1998 though the sell-off was exaggerated by the contract’s Tuesday expiry because no one wants to be left long to take delivery as there is nowhere to put the physical product. In any case, the 37% drop was the biggest one-day drop on record!  Read More

04.18.20- U.S. Energy Consumption
Falls To 16-Year Low
Haley Zaremba

As the fight to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus shuts down economies across the globe, we have had to change the way that we live as broad swaths of the worldwide population shelters in place. Already, we have seen massive implications for peoples’ employments and livelihoods, sweeping announcements of bankruptcy across a multitude of market sectors, and huge disruptions to global supply chains.  While the coronavirus has been a tragedy of massive proportions, having killed nearly 150,000 people across the globe and financially devastated many more, there have been some silver linings to the shutdown of the global economy. In China, the dramatic decrease in air pollution has actually saved more lives than COVID-19 has taken. Read More

04.17.20- The Big Shale Short: Twitter Traders Make Millions On The Oil Price Crash
Tsvetana Paraskova

If one day Hollywood picks up a movie to make about this year’s decline in the U.S. oil industry, it could call it ‘The Big Shale Short,’ after the 2015 film ‘The Big Short.’

The blockbuster from 2015 tells the true story of a bunch of investors who bet against the U.S. housing market before the subprime mortgage crisis and the market collapse in 2008, making millions of US dollars from their shorts.

‘The Big Shale Short’ may have just found its lead characters. On Twitter. Read More

04.16.20- Two new solar cells break records, including highest efficiency ever
Michael Irving

Solar cells are constantly improving on the road to maximum efficiency. Now, three records have been broken by two different devices, including one that pushes the highest overall solar conversion efficiency towards the 50-percent mark.

The top honor was claimed by researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), who have developed a new solar cell with an efficiency of 47.1 percent. That makes it the most efficient solar cell of any kind in the world – for now, at least. These records have a tendency to be broken pretty regularly. Read More

04.15.20- How COVID-19 Is Impacting The Ethanol And Corn Producers
Robert Rapier

Kansas farmer Jon McClure and his son Derek are preparing to plant this year's corn crop as the ... [+]>>>

In the previous article, I reported that gasoline demand had plummeted to the lowest demand number in more than 50 years.

But the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t just impacting the nation’s refiners and oil producers. The U.S. is also subject to a Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) which consumes most of the nation’s corn ethanol. The steep drop in gasoline demand has had a domino effect, also crushing the nation’s ethanol demand, and subsequently corn demand. Read More

04.14.20- The Oil Price Crash Could Trigger A Geothermal Energy Boom
Tsvetana Paraskova

Geothermal is America’s untapped energy giant,’ the U.S. Department of Energy said in a report last year, highlighting in its analysis that this kind of “always-on” flexible renewable energy resource could grow 26-fold to generate 8.5 percent of U.S. electricity by 2050.  

Unlike wind and solar, geothermal energy is a 24/7 energy resource, but the technologies to explore and drill for resources and build facilities make geothermal more expensive than other renewables. Read More

04.13.20- The Reality Of The End Of Oil
Robert Rapier

The Oil Age has powered the world for well over a century. There have been two general schools of thought about how it will ultimately end.

There were those who believed that oil production would peak and begin to decline in the face of high global demand. This is essentially the peak oil argument, which many laymen mistakenly understand as “The world is running out of oil.” Read More

04.11.20- Flow battery could make renewable energy storage economically viable
Paul Ridden

Researchers at the University of Southern California looking to crack the renewable energy storage problem have developed a new version of a redox flow battery from inexpensive and readily-available materials.

Though there are huge lithium-ion battery installations from the likes of Tesla that can store energy harvested from renewables like wind and solar, they're not exactly cheap. The USC researchers looked to an existing design that stores energy in liquid form. Read More

04.10.20- And Now, for Someting Entirely Different: Why America Leads the World
in Covid-19 Cases
Eric Zuesse

At of the start of the day on April 9th, the United States, which has 4.2% of the world’s population, had 28.7% of the world’s known Covid-19 (or “coronavirus-19”) cases.

This infection-rate tends to be higher in cities than in rural areas. 82% of America’s population is urban. 55% of the world’s population is urban. The most-urbanized nations (100% urban), and their respective number of Covid-19 cases as of April 9th (shown in parentheses), are Bermuda (39), Cayman Islands (45), Gibraltar (120), Hong Kong (961), Kuwait (855), Monaco (81), Nauru (none shown), and Singapore (1,623). Read More

04.09.20- The opportunities in this crisis might be right under your nose
Joe Jarvis

Central planning in the Soviet Union caused massive shortages.

But government incompetence and corruption had its silver lining.

For instance, housing shortages kept people cooped up in small crowded quarters. But that meant tight-knit communities formed, where people could rely on one another for mutual aid during the hard times.

And there were plenty of hard times. Read More

04.08.20- $1 Oil: Saudi Arabia's Attempt
To Crush U.S. Shale
Tom Kool

After having crashed nearly 70 percent in the first three months of 2020, benchmark WTI prices are trying to form a bottom around $20 per barrel. 

But this psychological threshold is looking increasingly shaky as global crude storage facilities are filling up at an unprecedented pace. OPEC and its partners officially ended their output cut deal today, following the words of Russian Energy Minister Novak that every producer is ‘’free to pump at will’’. Read More

04.07.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Was COVID-19 intended for biological & economic warfare?
Mat Staver

Many have speculated that COVID-19’s “escape” from the Wuhan lab was simply an accident. Others are speculating that China launched COVID-19 in part as retaliation for Trump’s pro-America trade agreements. Whether by accident or design, it is clear that China was working on biological warfare, and it was unleashed on the world.

China is now taking full advantage of the resulting chaos to enact the next phase of the communist country’s 20-year campaign of economic warfare against the United States. Read More

04.06.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Differeny: Rabobank: "There Will Be Attempts To Go Back To Normal After This Crisis, But It Will Be Impossible"
Michael Every

The Grand National-ists

The weekend’s world-famous UK horse race, the Grand National, was won by Potters Corner, trained in Wales and ridden by Jack Tudor, at 18-1. That’s a little unusual – but not as much as the fact that this was all a virtual race run on a computer because the actual Grand National was cancelled for the first time since WW2 due to COVID-19. Read More

04.04.20- The Ocean Could Be The Ultimate Renewable Energy Source
Alex Kimani

For all their hype as the biggest and final frontier in clean energy production, tidal and wave power have never quite lived up to their potential. The IEA estimates that we harnessed just 1.2TWh of energy from the world’s vast oceans in 2018--a minuscule fraction of the ~170,000TWh in global primary energy consumption.  This sad situation is not for lack of trying, though. 

More than 70 companies have developed various technologies to generate electricity from ocean tides or the kinetic power of waves, leading to global ocean energy production rising tenfold over the last decade. Yet, most never advance past the pilot stages into full commercialization. Read More

04.03.20- What Really Caused Oil
To Rally By 25%?
Nick Cunningham

Oil prices spiked 25 percent on Thursday after President Trump tweeted that Saudi Arabia and Russia would cut production by 10 to 15 million barrels per day (mb/d), but there are a variety of reasons why a cut of this size faces steep odds. 

This should be prefaced with the fact that nobody knows what will happen and that the onset of a global pandemic means that all of the old rules are thrown out the window. Anything can happen in the context of the greatest public health and economic crisis in a century. Read More

04.02.20- The US Can't Afford To Let Shale Fail
Robert Rapier

It’s no secret that the growth of U.S. shale oil has been a thorn in the sides of both Saudi Arabia and Russia. They have seen their market shares erode as the shale boom made the U.S. the world’s largest producer of crude oil. But Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Saudi Aramco, is a single entity that produces 13 percent of the world’s oil and controls 17 percent of the world’s proved reserves. That puts them in a very powerful position. They can withhold a lot of oil from the market, or they can flood the market with oil and crash the price. Read More

04.01.20- Oil Markets Are On
The Brink Of Armageddon
Mitchell McGeorge

“Two boys are in a closed garage with several inches of gasoline on the floor. One has six large matches, the other has seven smaller ones. They debate as to who is strategically superior”.  J.K. Galbraith

The world’s oil markets are at a crisis point arguably not seen in its history. 

Since the last meeting of OPEC/OPEC+ concluded, global oil prices have collapsed to close Friday at 53.14% down for WTI and 51.14% down for Brent. These prices are the lowest seen in almost twenty years. Oil prices have tumbled as the fallout of that meeting compounded the unprecedented hit to consumption from the coronavirus pandemic. Read More

03.31.20- Oil Majors Are Preparing for $10 Oil
Wall St For Main St

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03.30.20- The Unthinkable Is Happening: Oil Storage Space Is About To Run Out
Tyler Durden

In the past three weeks, oil plunged and has continued to plunge even more in the aftermath of the oil price war declared between Saudi Arabia and Russia, and where US shale (and its junk bonds) has been caught in the crossfire. However, as we reported last week, we may get to the absurd point when the price of a barrel of oil not only hits $0 but goes negative. Read More

03.28.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: All The Craziest Things About America Are Being Highlighted By This Virus
Caitlin Johnstone

“Corona is a black light and America is a cum-stained hotel room,” comedian Megan Amram colorfully tweeted a couple of weeks ago. Her observation has only grown more accurate since.

The corporate cronyism of America’s political system has been highlighted with a massive kleptocratic multitrillion-dollar corporate bailout of which actual Americans are only receiving a tiny fraction. Instead of putting that money toward paying people a living wage to stay home during a global pandemic, the overwhelming majority of the money is going to corporations while actual human beings receive a paltry $1,200 (which they won’t even be getting until May at the earliest) at a time of record-smashing unemployment. Read More

03.27.20- The Energy Disaster Kicking into Full Gear: World Is Totally Unprepared For What’s Ahead
Steve St Angelo

There’s more evidence finally surfacing in the media of the dire energy predicament the world is now facing.  The negative ramifications of peak oil and the falling EROI were going to hit the world economy within the next 2-5 years, but the global contagion has sped up the process considerably.  Unfortunately, the world will never return back to the energy consumption and GDP growth experienced in 2019.  I believe the peak of unconventional oil production has finally arrived… FOREVER. Read More

03.26.20- Don’t Believe The Oil Bulls
Nick Cunningham

The world surplus could reach 20 million barrels per day (mb/d) in the next few weeks, threatening not only to top off storage tanks everywhere, but to crash prices even further and shut in oil production.  The shutdown orders in the U.S. continue to multiply, confining tens of millions of people to their homes. Much of Western Europe remains on lockdown as well. 

The impact of this pandemic will only grow as the U.S. has failed to contain its spread. Cases are doubling every few days, and state governments are rushing to impose stay-at-home orders. The response is scattershot, much too late and still much too permissive to stop the spread. But large-scale home isolation is now the only option to mitigate the damage. Read More

03.25.20- Oil Prices Are Set To Plunge Again
Irina Slav

Oil prices have been on the slide for more than two weeks now, and they will, in all likelihood, continue downward despite the respite from the United States legislators who raised hopes that they could agree on a $2-trillion economic stimulus package in response to the pandemic.  But will this be enough?

Reuters' John Kemp wrote in his latest column on hedge fund oil positions that global consumption of fuels had dropped by as much as 10 million bpd. He also said hedge funds had tried to feel the inflection point for oil prices twice since the crisis began and had failed both times. The final nail in the coffin of hopes: the economic situation, according to Kemp, is the worst since the Second World War. Read More

03.24.20- And Now, for Someting Entirely Different: So Far, The Number Of Americans That Have Died From The Coronavirus Is Greater Than The Number That Have Recovered
Michael Snyder

The information that I am about to share with you is quite disturbing, and it has some very alarming implications.  One of the great mysteries of this coronavirus pandemic has been the widely varying death rates that we have been witnessing all over the world.  For example, South Korea has had 8,981 confirmed cases so far.  Of those cases that have been resolved one way or the other, 111 victims have died and 3,166 victims have recovered.  So that would seem to indicate a very low death rate in that nation.  But in Italy, things are very different.  Up to this point, there have been 59,138 confirmed cases.  Of the cases that have been resolved, 5,476 victims have died and 7,024 have recovered.  Read More

03.23.20- U.S. Oil Price Collapse =
U.S. Economic Collapse
Steve St Angelo

The oil price collapse is a bad omen for much worse things to follow.  The global contagion is impacting the U.S. economy and the domestic oil industry far greater than I realized just two weeks ago.  As I try to allow my analysis to “Catch Up” to the gravity of the situation, my new forecast of the U.S. economy and oil industry is quite dire indeed.

I don’t say this to panic anyone, but to provide a more “realistic and pragmatic” view of where we go from here over the next few weeks and months.  The rapid collapse in the U.S. oil price suggests BIG TROUBLE ahead for the domestic shale oil industry.  While the low oil price is causing havoc in the shale industry, it’s only one component of the overall equation. Read More

03.21.20- Weekend Rant: "This Is Not A Recession. It's an Ice Age..."
Annie Lowery

We can’t say we’re in a recession yet, at least not formally. A committee decides these things—no, really. The government generally adopts the view that a contraction is not a recession unless economic activity has declined over two quarters. But we’re in a recession and everyone knows it. And what we’re experiencing is so much more than that: a black swan, a financial war, a plague.

Maybe things feel normal where you are. Maybe things do not feel normal. Read More

03.20.20- The Inevitable Outcome Of
The Oil Price War
Simon Watkins

One might reasonably posit that when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) signalled that Saudi Arabia was once again going to produce oil to the maximum to crash oil prices in a full-scale oil price war, Russian President Vladimir Putin probably fell off the horse he was riding bare-chested somewhere in Siberia because he was laughing so much. There is a phrase in Russian intelligence circles for clueless people that are ruthlessly used without their knowledge in covert operations, which is ‘a useful idiot’, and it is hard to think of anyone more ‘useful’ in this context to the Russians than whoever came up with Saudi’s latest ‘plan’. Whichever way the oil price war pans out, Russia wins. Read More

03.19.20- Oil Could Crash To $10 As World Runs Out Of Storage
Irina Slav

The growing supply glut in oil markets could end up filling all storage tanks worldwide, potentially causing prices to drop even further

Global oil storage could overflow in the coming weeks as the coronavirus pandemic has dealt a severe blow to demand while Saudi Arabia has promised to supply 12.3 million bpd—not just in April but also over the next few months. Read More

03.18.20- Is $10 Oil On The Horizon?
Andreas de Vries

According to a number of cognitive scientists, mankind uses its unique ability to reason primarily for justifying pre-held convictions, rather than for forming convictions. It is of critical importance for strategists to understand and acknowledge this human tendency, as it causes one to easily fall prey to a number of cognitive biases, which prevent one from seeing things how they really are, and more important for the strategist, how they are likely to become.

One of the most famous cognitive biases is confirmation bias. As we prefer to be proven correct, we naturally incline towards information that confirms our views and try to ignore or reason away information that does not. Read More

03.17.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: I could face six months in jail for walking to the beach
Joe Jarvis

President James Garfield was shot at a train station on July 2, 1881.

But it took 80 days for the best doctors in the country to complete his assassination.

These doctors decided that the most important thing was to remove the bullet. So they stuck their dirty unwashed finger into the wound, cut incisions, and poked and prodded. Read More

03.16.20- And Now, foe Something Entirely Different: GET READY: Ten new predictions covering what will happen in America over the next 12 weeks due to the coronavirus
Mike Adams

Two days ago, Alex Jones called me, “The Oracle” on his show and the name sort of stuck. It turns out that when you run good mathematical projection models, you really can sort of “see the future” to the astonishment of many. In truth, I’m just running the numbers and reporting what the math tells me. There’s really no voodoo involved.

That math, by the way, leads me to some rather sobering predictions and warnings that I will share with you here. I probably should have shared these two weeks ago, but nobody would have believed me then. Read More

03.14.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Goodbye to All That... The Demise of Globalization and Imperial Pretensions
Charles Hugh Smith

The decline phase of the S-Curve is just beginning. 

Globalization and Imperial Pretensions have been decaying for years; now the tide has turned definitively against them. The Covid-19 pandemic didn't cause the demise of globalization and Imperial Pretensions; it merely pushed the rickety structures over the edge. Read More

03.13.20- Should You Sell Your Oil Stocks Now?
Alex Kimani

There are three questions tormenting investors in the oil and gas industry right now: 

Why did Icahn double down on Occidental Petroleum? Is Warren Buffett right when he says “turnarounds seldom turn”? And how much longer can oil and gas companies hold out in this unrelenting storm?

And they all lead to the ultimate question: Should we be getting rid of our oil holdings? Read More

03.12.20- Oil Crashes Again On U.S. Travel Ban
Irina Slav

After a brief respite following reports of central bank economic stimuli in the United States and the UK, crude oil slumped once again after on Wednesday, President Donald Trump instituted a 30-day travel ban on most European countries because of the coronavirus pandemic.

At the time of writing Brent crude was trading down by more than 8 percent at $32.71 a barrel, with West Texas Intermediate at $30.27 a barrel, also down by more than 8 percent. Read More

03.11.20- Don't Be Fooled By The Oil Price Rebound
Irina Slav

A mild winter in the northern hemisphere, the COVID-19 outbreak, and now the price war that Saudi Arabia declared last weekend have combined to produce an all-new oil price crisis just four years after the last one. And things might get worse before they get better.

After last week data from hedge funds showed a slowdown in the selloff of oil and fuel contracts, as reported by Reuters’ John Kemp, this week’s data, for the first week of March, indicated a serious acceleration of sales. During that week, Kemp reported in his weekly column, fund sold the equivalent of 133 million barrels of oil across the six most traded oil and fuel contracts. This compares with sales of just 11 million barrels of oil equivalent across the six contracts just a week earlier. Read More

03.10.20- In Crashing the Oil Price,
Russia Just Told the World, ‘No!’
Tom Luongu

There is real power in the word “No.”

In fact, I’d argue that it is the single most powerful word in any language.

In the midst of the worst market meltdown in a dozen years which has at its source problems within global dollar-funding markets, Russia found itself in the position to exercise the Power of No. Read More

03.09.20- Saudi Arabia Starts All-Out Oil War: MbS Destroys OPEC By Flooding Market,
Slashing Oil Prices
Tyler Durden

With the commodity world still smarting from the Nov 2014 Saudi decision to (temporarily) break apart OPEC, and flood the market with oil in (failed) hopes of crushing US shale producers (who survived thanks to generous banks extending loan terms and even more generous buyers of junk bonds), which nonetheless resulted in a painful manufacturing recession as the price of Brent cratered as low as the mid-$20's in late 2015/early 2016.  Read More

03.07.20- Oil Price Armageddon As OPEC+ Disintegrates
Tom Kool

It appears that the OPEC+ alliance may soon be over as Russia refuses to cut and its oil minister hints at increasing production.

Oil prices plunged by more than 8 percent after the OPEC+ meeting broke up with no deal. Saudi Arabia and Russia negotiated behind closed doors in Vienna, but Moscow refused to sign on to deeper production cuts. Now there is uncertainty about whether the OPEC+ alliance will survive. A day earlier, OPEC essentially issued an ultimatum, calling for 1.5 mb/d of production cuts, but suggested that no deal would occur without Russia. At the time of this writing, oil prices were in freefall. WTI was below $43 and Brent near $46. Read More

03.06.20- China Could Start A New Solar Price War
Haley Zaremba

The solar market is becoming supersized, with the size and scale of solar projects soaring and some of the biggest names in the tech industry getting behind the renewable energy boom. Despite the high-profile failure of the $1 billion Crescent Dunes solar plant developed by SolarReserve way out in the Nevada desert, which was going to be the biggest solar plant in the world, the solar industry is moving forward in its belief that, in most cases, bigger is better.  Read More

03.05.20- The Risk For Oil Is Shifting To The Upside
Irina Slav

The oil price slide that prompted several weeks of oil contract selling amo­ng hedge funds could be coming to a close, according to the latest data on hedge fund oil buying and selling, as reported by Reuters’ John Kemp. News from the oil industry has also helped spark some optimism. Unfortunately, chances are this would only be temporary as the outlook for oil remains rather pessimistic.

Sales of the six most popular oil contracts slowed down to 11 million barrels of oil equivalent during the last week of February, Kemp reported, noting that this was before another wave of concern about the spread of the Chinese coronavirus rattled the oil market. Read More

03.04.20- Why Hydrogen Stocks Are Soaring
Vanand Meliksetian

For decades climate change was a topic for predominantly environmentalists. Since the early 2010s, this has changed dramatically. The transformation culminated in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 where the world agreed on a comprehensive path to tackle an existential threat. Consequentially the energy transition has strongly gained in importance as countries around the world are racing to replace their carbon-intensive economies with green alternatives. Read More

03.03.20- Self-healing potassium batteries: A cheap, long-life rival to lithium
Loz Blain

American scientists say they've solved the dendrite formation problem that's held back the development of cheap, powerful, high-density potassium batteries

Lithium is expensive, environmentally questionable in large volumes, and tends to catch on fire from time to time. It's the best solution we've currently got for EV and device battery storage, but other alternatives are starting to surface, and one that could actually make a fair bit of sense is the potassium metal battery. Read More

03.02.20- Oil Market Meltdown Sends Energy Stocks Crashing
Nick Cunningham

The market meltdown continued on Thursday, with stocks across the board in retreat. Oil prices were down more than 4 percent in early trading, falling to their lowest levels in more than a year.

WTI plunged below $47 per barrel, and at the time of this writing, Brent was flirting with sub-$50.  Read More

02.29.20- Rust and light combine for a 25x boost in hydrogen production
Loz Blain

Scientists at the Tokyo University of Science have used rust as a catalyst in light-assisted hydrogen production from organic waste, finding it produces 25 times more hydrogen than previous titanium dioxide catalysts.

Japan and Korea, in particular, see hydrogen as the clean fuel of the future, and are reorganizing themselves to make way for a zero-emissions "hydrogen economy" in which transport will mainly be driven by fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen-burning engines, which emit only water as their end product. Read More

02.28.20- Techrules looks to power everyday EVs and grids with micro-turbines
Chris Weiss

Those that know Techrules at all know it as the Chinese company behind the micro-turbine-powered, fighter jet-inspired Ren supercar, but it's making a push to be known far outside of supercar fanatic circles. The company is working to transform the range-extending micro-turbines powering up the motors of the 1,300-hp Ren into standalone generators for commercial and passenger car use. It'll start with a 45-kW version to wire into commercial electrical grids before shrinking the tech down even more to put inside everyday electric passenger cars. Read More

02.27.20- The Dark Side Of Hydropower
Irina Slav

Hydropower is the largest single source of renewable electricity in the world, dwarfing solar and wind. As such, it has established a positive reputation in the media and many academic papers. But that’s not the whole story ... 

Hydropower has a darker side that is threatening freshwater ecosystems more than oil, more than gas, and more than any other form of energy. Read More

02.26.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Early American Militias: The Forgotten History of Militias from 1776 until the Civil War
Sam Jacobs

The United States militia is enshrined in the Second Amendment of the Constitution. And while the militia movement of today is widely known, its history – and the history of independent Constitutional militias stretching back to the dawn of the republic – is far less well known.

Why does this matter nowadays? Because understanding the historical roots of America's militias helps modern-day members appreciate the role they play in our federal system of government. Read More

02.25.20- Two Innovations That Could Make CO2 Fuel A Reality
Irina Slav

Carbon capture technology has been garnering more and more attention as one way to solve the world’s human-made emissions problem, but costs remain an obstacle. But another technology might help: turning CO2 back into fuel.

Two recent inventions are giving hope, and both have to do with nanocatalysts. 

As the name suggests, these are microscopic catalysts-hemicals that accelerate a chemical reaction between elements-and these catalysts can be used in hydrogenation to produce useful gases. Read More

02.24.20- Two Abundant Elements That Could Create A Superbattery
Alex Kimani

For decades, scientists have been on the prowl for advanced battery materials with features such as superior energy density or those that confer extra-long battery life leading to such futuristic designs as bendable batteries that mimic the human spine, to breathable nanochain structures. 

But maybe they have been looking in the wrong places, with nature’s own biological kingdom providing a potential solution. Read More

02.22.20- Can The U.S. Compete With China In The Energy Storage Race?
Haley Zaremba

Last year Oilprice reported that the energy storage industry was about to explode in China. We wrote that “China is set to become the single biggest energy storage market in the Asia Pacific region by 2024,” citing a Wood Mackenzie report that said China was in the midst of a global energy storage market takeover with “cumulative energy storage capacity projected to skyrocket from 489 megawatts (MW) or 843 megawatt-hours (MWh) in 2017 to 12.5 gigawatts (GW) or 32.1GWh in 2024.” Read More

02.21.20- Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech
Loz Blain

Australian company HB11 says it's well on the way to nuclear fusion energy generation without the radioactive fuels or super-high temperatures

"We are sidestepping all of the scientific challenges that have held fusion energy back for more than half a century," says the director of an Australian company that claims its hydrogen-boron fusion technology is already working a billion times better than expected. Read More

02.20.20- Researchers achieve a 10x supercapacitor energy density breakthrough
Loz Blain

Supercapacitors can charge almost instantly, and discharge enormous amounts of power if needed. They could completely erase the Achilles heel of electric vehicles – their slow charging times – if they could hold more energy. And now Chinese and British scientists say they've figured out a way to store 10 times more energy per volume than previous supercapacitors. Read More

02.19.20- Europe's Largest Economy Is Betting Big On Hydrogen
Vanand Meliksetian

The energy transition is a herculean challenge that is being thwarted by the world’s addiction to fossil fuels. Fortunately, the IEA had some good news recently when it announced that CO2 emissions in 2019 did not increase compared to 2018 while the world economy grew by 3 percent. The unexpected stabilization is primarily the result of the rapid growth of renewables and the substitution of coal by natural gas. The biggest contributor to the reduction of CO2 emissions is the EU, with a decrease of 5 percent. Germany’s share was the largest of the OECD countries with a decrease of 8 percent. Read More

02.18.20- Trump, Saudi Arabia and the End of the Petrodollar
Nick Giambruno

• The end of Saudi Arabia means the end of the petrodollar which will likely lead to the dollar falling severely against gold resulting in severe inflation, nationalisation of retirement savings and other forms of wealth confiscation
  
  
• There are straightforward steps you can start taking today to protect your savings and yourself from the financial and sociopolitical effects of the collapse of the petrodollar.
  
  
• The sad truth is, most people have no idea how bad things could get, let alone how to prepare… Read More

02.17.20- The Next Renewable Energy Source Could Be Rain
Irina Slav

The quest for the next source of renewable energy is well under way, with no natural phenomenon overlooked. We have already harnessed the power of flowing water, wind, and sunlight, and the search for the next clean source of energy is far from over.

The latest potential breakthrough in renewable energy comes in the form of rain. Read More

02.15.20- Coronavirus Outbreak Hits Solar Power Development In Asia
Tsvetana Paraskova

The coronavirus outbreak is impacting the energy sector beyond the depressed oil demand in the world’s top oil importer and key oil demand growth driver, China.

Due to factory shutdowns and production disruptions, exports of solar panels and other components out of China are being delayed, disrupting the supply chain of the solar power industries and affecting solar projects in Asia.  Read More

02.14.20- The Metal Trump Wants More Than Gold
Charles Kennedy

Global dominance at this point in the game means control of the rare earths elements that form the backbone of existing technology and the future of technology, and while everyone is busy playing at war with oil and gas, Beijing is busy sitting on a monopoly of our most precious strategic metals. 

There are 16 metals in total that form the world’s strategically critical rare-earth elements--and China controls the supply of every single one because it controls 96% of production. 

One of these crucial metals is Cesium.  Read More

02.13.20- The Shale Oil Bubble Accounted For 99% Of U.S. Oil Production Growth Since 2007
Steve St Angelo

Without the unprofitable and unconventional shale oil supply, U.S. oil production would still be below 5 million barrels per day.  While we can applaud the shale industry for allowing the American Leech & Spend Suburban Economy to continue for another decade, I wouldn’t count on it lasting another ten years.  If we are lucky, we may get another 1-2 years before the entire U.S. Shale Oil Ponzi Scheme comes crashing down.  Read More

02.12.20- Can Hydrogen Trucks
Kill Diesel Demand?
Irina Slav

Hydrogen, once touted as the fuel of the future and then slipping into near oblivion as electric cars gained popularity, may still have a future as a fuel, just not for passenger cars. Hydrogen, it seems, could become the preferred fuel for a category of vehicles that currently account for a significant share of oil demand: long-haul trucks.

S&P Global Platts Analytics recently made the case for hydrogen fuel as an economical replacement of diesel in semi trucks by arguing that it was potentially a cheaper alternative to both electric trucks and compressed natural gas vehicles. Read More

02.11.20- Could This Be The Decade Of Green Hydrogen?
Tsvetana Paraskova

Of those alternatives, renewable energy is already making steady progress in electricity generation capacity, while another source of energy—hydrogen is also gaining momentum and is being touted as a key fuel in the energy transition.

Hydrogen has the potential to become a key clean fuel source in the future that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions—this could be the perfect solution to supplying growing amounts of low-carbon fuel and energy.  Read More

02.10.20- Global Warming's 50 Years of Fraud
Jack Hellner

The theory for those pushing the green new deal or some other radical energy policy that will destroy tens of millions of jobs and greatly harm the poor and middle class is that humans, CO2, and fossil fuels cause warming and climate change. This warming causes the ice to melt in Alaska, then the melting ice causes sea levels to rise and the rising sea levels will cause coastal cities to under water.

They have predicted the coastal cities to disappear for the last 100 years and they have been wrong for 100 years. Read More

02.08.20- U.S. Top Shale Oil Fields Decline 10 Times Faster Than Global Oil Industry
Steve St Angelo

The Global Economy is heading for serious trouble when the disintegration of the U.S. Shale Oil Industry begins, likely within the next few years.  With Global GDP growth based on world oil production growth, the main driver has been the U.S. shale oil industry. This is terrible news because the top U.S. shale oil fields are declining ten times the rate as are the world’s mature oil fields. Read More

02.07.20- Oil Demand Under Siege As Airlines Cancel Over 50,000 Flights
Julianne Geiger

Over 54,011 airline flights scheduled to, from, and within China between January 23 and February 4 were canceled, according to Cirium data cited by CNBC, creating a ripple effect for global oil demand.

The 50,000+ flights account for 28% of all scheduled flights to, from, and within China, and 14% of those flights that were canceled were international flights.

And more cancellations are coming. Read More

02.06.20- New ‘Solar Panels’ Harness
The Energy Of Deep Space
Haley Zaremba

Solar power is cheaper than ever, it’s ultra-abundant, and it emits zero greenhouse gases. But it’s far from perfect--for now. One of the biggest limitations of solar energy (which applies to wind power as well) is that it is variable and is not dispatchable. Variability refers to the fact that solar power is dependent on a completely unreliable factor: the weather. Solar panels don’t generate energy if the sun isn’t shining, meaning that they don’t function for an entire half of every day and function far under capacity during overcast daylight hours. They also can’t be turned on and off according to the grid’s needs, known as dispatchability. Instead of being able to respond to the energy needs of the grid, the grid has to work around the productivity of the solar panels. Read More

02.05.20- Brace For A Global Crisis In 2020
Gregory R. Copley

The year 2020 could emerge as the start of the era of relative global chaos or major upheaval. It is the era we have been anticipating, as the impact of core population decline meets economic dislocation, and security and structural uncertainty.

Changes in the fundamental sociological framework of global society, due to the end of the population growth cycle - and with it the end of the economic growth cycle based on expanding market size - were beginning to become evident by the beginning of 2020. It was apparent that 2020 was likely to see an evolution in this transformation. Read More

02.04.20- Harvester pulls record amount of drinking water out of thin air
Michael Irving

Clean water is all around us, and more literally than you might think – it's floating around in the air most of the time. Of course, it’s not particularly drinkable in that form, but now researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) have found materials that can collect huge amounts of water from the air.

As is the case with similar systems we've covered previously, the key lies with a material called a metal-organic framework (MOF). These structures have the highest surface area of any known material – in fact, if you were able to unfold just one gram of an MOF, it would be enough to cover a football field. Read More

02.03.20- Pipeline or a Pipe Dream: Israel, Turkey Hydrocarbon Conflict is Brewing in the Mediterranean
Ramzy Baroud

Massive natural gas discoveries off the eastern coast of Israel and Palestine is slated to make Tel Aviv a regional energy hub. Whether Israel will be able to translate positive indicators of the largely untapped gas reserves into actual economic and strategic wealth is yet to be seen.

What is certain, however, is that the Middle East is already in the throes of a major geostrategic war, which has the potential of becoming an actual military confrontation. Read More

Russian Oil Firm Could Sign Fuel-For-Diamonds Deal In This African Nation
Tsvetana Paraskova

Russian oil firm Tatneft could strike a deal with Zimbabwe to supply fuel to the crisis-stricken African country in exchange for diamonds, the Zimbabwe Independent reportedon Friday, describing the potential deal as ‘murky’ because Zimbabwe’s Minister of Mining, Winston Chitando, told the news outlet that he was not aware of any such development. 

“It is the first time I am hearing of that. The bottom line is that it is not true. I maintain that it is not true,” Chitando told the Zimbabwe Independent. Read More

01.31.20- Can Seawater Batteries Replace Lithium?
Irina Slav

Lithium and cobalt: the two components of a rechargeable battery that have spurred a research and development rush may eventually meet their match in the future, in a simple element available in abundance in seawater.

Sodium, unlike lithium is widely available everywhere there is saltwater. And since saltwater makes up the bulk of the Earth’s surface, it’s safe to say that it is quite abundant and easy to access. It also has properties that make it an excellent substitute for the lithium in batteries. Read More

01.30.20- US Oil Exports Could Explode After Once In A Lifetime Power Shift In China
Simon Watkins

The consensus of opinion is that China’s commitment to buy an additional US$52.4 billion in U.S. energy products in 2020/21 as part of the Phase 1 trade deal between the two countries is impossible to achieve. The consensus is wrong, as a paradigmatic shift currently taking place in the core power structure of China means that the new energy products import targets are eminently achievable. Whether China wants to achieve them, though, is another issue entirely. Read More

01.29.20- GM Claims To Have The Next Model T
Jon LeSage

General Motors has a grand, visionary concept vehicle up its sleeve that could replace Henry Ford launching the Model T — but where will it be legal to drive?

Cruise, GM’s self-driving vehicle division, last week launched the Cruise Origin, developed with Honda Motor Co. The large white, boxed minivan with an orange roof will be autonomous and designed to carry groups of passengers — and the vehicle will lack a steering wheel or brake pedal. It will bring together a self-driving car with competitive, affordable shared-ride services. Read More

01.28.20- Which Is Safer For The Environment? Lithium-Ion Or Lead-Acid Batteries?
Robert Rapier

Following recent articles I wrote on both lithium-ion and lead-acid batteries, I received significant correspondence about the environmental pros and cons of both types of battery. In this article I will use some of the feedback and references I received in an effort to compare and contrast some environmental impacts of these two types of battery.

Because of the long history of lead-acid batteries, there is a significant body of literature discussing their impact on the environment. But lithium-ion batteries are newer to the market, and their environmental impact is still being worked out. Read More

01.27.20- Seriously – how deluded and gullible are people who subscribe to this nonsense?
Robert W. Felix

“32 years and billions of wasted dollars later they best they can come up with is fake data, fake graphs, a child advocate who dropped out of school…

Seriously – how deluded and gullible are people who subscribe to this nonsense?” - Rosco Mac Read More

01.25.20- How To Solve Nuclear Energy’s
Biggest Problem
Haley Zaremba

Nuclear waste is a huge issue and it’s not going away any time soon--in fact, it’s not going away for millions of years. While most types of nuclear waste remain radioactive for mere tens of thousands of years, the half-life of Chlorine-36 is 300,000 years and neptunium-237 boasts a half-life of a whopping 2 million years. 

All this radioactivity amounts to a huge amount of maintenance to ensure that our radioactive waste is being properly managed throughout its extraordinarily long shelf life and isn’t endangering anyone. And, it almost goes without saying, all this maintenance comes at a cost. In the United States, nuclear waste carries a particularly hefty cost. Read More

01.24.20- Why The Coronavirus Is A Real Threat To Oil Markets
Julianne Geiger

It impairs your breathing, causes extreme fatigue and fevers. It kills. And beyond that, it’s keeping oil prices low by threatening to stifle oil demand in one of the world’s largest oil markets.

It’s SARS CoV, better known as the SARS Coronavirus, and it’s shaping up to be the oil market’s biggest nemesis this year. And there’s no cure.

SARS, which stands for severe acute respiratory syndrome, is not only deadly, but highly contagious—more contagious than originally thought, and this coronavirus-inspired fear has now decisively spilled over into the oil market. Read More

01.23.20- Broad-spectrum solar breakthrough could efficiently produce hydrogen
Loz Blain

A new molecule developed by Ohio State University scientists can harvest energy from the entire visible spectrum of light, bringing in up to 50 percent more solar energy than current solar cells, and can also catalyze that energy into hydrogen.

Hydrogen is viewed by many folks, particularly in Japan and Korea, as the clean-burning fuel that might power our vehicles in a low-emissions future. One way to produce hydrogen is to split it out of water. This is typically done by splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity, but a potentially simpler and more efficient way to do it may be through photocatalytic water splitting, which uses light itself as the energy source instead of electricity, removing electricity production from the process altogether. Read More

01.22.20- Goldman: China Coronavirus Could Push Oil Down By $3
Irina Slav

The outbreak of a coronavirus in China that is now an international threat could cut oil demand by 260,000 bpd, which would translate into a price drop of almost $3 per barrel, Goldman Sachs has said.

Most of the demand loss will come from jet fuel as the risk of disease discourages travelers from getting on a plane, according to the investment bank, whose analysts qualified the outbreak’s effect on oil prices as modest, Bloomberg reports. Read More

01.21.20- Has Natural Gas Hit Rock Bottom?
Nick Cunningham

U.S. natural gas prices fell below $2/MMBtu on Friday for the first time in nearly four years.

The gas market is suffering from oversupply, as the shale industry has drilled the market into another bust. The share prices for top gas players were deep into red territory on Friday. Range Resources, for instance, was off by more than 8 percent. Read More

01.20.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Fake Investigations...
Designed To Fool You
Bryce Buchanan

Many government officials with long entrenched power are unwilling to give up any of that power.  In their minds, they have a right to control our lives as they see fit, with complete indifference to our wishes.  To avoid rebellion, they need to hide this fact as much as possible.  They want the citizens to believe the lie that we are a nation of laws with equal justice under the law.  To advance this lie, they have staged many theatrical productions that they call “investigations”.  They try to give us the impression that they want to expose the facts and punish wrongdoing. Read More

01.18.20- Five Clean Energy Trends
To Watch In 2020
Tsvetana Paraskova

At the start of 2020, analysts bravely stepped out on a limb to predict how the turbulent energy market and energy systems will evolve at the beginning of the new decade.  

Clean energy and climate policy experts have shared in Forbes their forecasts for this year’s energy system in the United States with Silvio Marcacci, Communications Director for climate policy think tank Energy Innovation. Read More

01.17.20- Solar Installations to Grow by Additional 142 GW in 2020 – Seven Times the World’s Total Solar Installations a Decade Ago
IHS Markit

Global solar installations will continue double-digit growth rates into the new decade, according to the new 2020 Global Photovoltaic (PV) Demand Forecast by IHS Markit (NYSE: INFO), a world leader in critical information, analytics and solutions. New annual installations in 2020 will reach 142 gigawatts (GW), a 14 % rise over the previous year.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: 

Diversification of the global solar PV market. Read More

01.16.20- Florida To Buy Part Of Everglades To Protect Them From Oil Drilling
Irina Slav

Florida has agreed to buy part of the Everglades wetlands to protect the sensitive ecosystem from oil drilling, Reuters reports, citing an announcement by the Florida governor.

The deal, which will involve 20,000 acres, will be the largest acquisition of wetlands in Floridain ten years. The seller is Kanter Real Estate LLC, which had requested a permit for oil exploration in the area from the state. The Environmental Protection Department denied the permit, Kanter sued and the court ruled in favor of the company. Read More

01.15.20- Massive Oil Product Build
Sends Prices Lower
Irina Slav

A day after the API’s crude oil inventory report pressured prices, the EIA relieved some of the pressure by reporting an inventory draw of 2.5 million barrels for the week to January 10.

Analysts had expected the authority to report an inventory decline of 750,000 barrels for the period. A week earlier, the EIA estimated inventories had added 1.2 million barrels, after for the last week of 2019 it reported an inventory decline of 11.5 million barrels. Read More

01.14.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Australia Burning... Disaster Capitalism or Something Else?
Joseph P. Farrell

By far and away this past week, the biggest story flooding my email inbox were the fires in Australia. That’s partially understandable, as many members and readers of this website live in Australia. When these first started, though, I was skeptical of the explanations – what few there were – on the media. I did manage to hear a story from the Australian media that in one instance they had arrested two young men committing arson, who somehow managed to get the uniforms of a fire department in New South Wales.  But the lack of details thus far has been the most suspicious thing. Note that I said “thus far”, because details are beginning to emerge… Read More

01.13.20- How residential energy storage could help support the power grid
Sean Kane

Household batteries could contribute to making the grid more cost effective, reliable, resilient, and safe—if retail battery providers, utilities, and regulators can resolve delicate commercial, operational, and policy issues.

The growth of battery storage in the power sector has attracted a great deal of attention in the industry and media. Much of that attention focuses on utility-scale batteries and on batteries for commercial and industrial customers. While these larger batteries are critical segments of the energy-storage market, the rapid growth of residential energy storage is outpacing expectations, and these household systems will likely become important assets sooner than many expect. The growth trajectory and potential value of these household systems to customers and the power grid warrants a closer look. Read More

01.11.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Atlanta Police Make Monumental Move, Disband Entire Drug Unit to Focus
on Actual Crime
Matt Agoris

The Atlanta police department just made a revolutionary move. Let's hope other cities follow suit!

In one of the most revolutionary moves we’ve reported on to date, the Atlanta Police Department announced this week that they are disbanding their narcotics unit so they can fight actual violent crime. This move is both revolutionary and heartening and is another nail in the war on drugs’ coffin. Read More

01.10.20- Progressive Eco-Group Admits It: Renewable Energy is a Hoax that Benefits its Greenie Elmer Gantries like Al Gore
John Eidson

Independent physicist John Droz, Jr. alerted me to the website of Deep Green Resistance (DGR), an international environmental organization that calls for the total destruction of what it refers to as the “global industrial economy,” a.k.a. capitalism.  Given the group’s hard-left credentials, its call for dismantling capitalism throughout the world is not surprising.

What is surprising is that in an unusual show of progressive candor, Deep Green Resistance openly acknowledges what skeptical scientists have been saying for more than two decades: that renewable energy is a government-backed hoax that enriches big corporations -- and green energy investors like Al Gore -- at the expense of taxpayers and the environment. Read More

01.09.20- "Solar umbrellas" could reduce the blight of evaporation ponds
Berkley Labs

Scientists at Berkeley Lab have developed a sort of “solar umbrella” which could radically reduce the amount of land needed for industrial evaporation ponds.

Evaporation ponds are a cheap way to deal with waste water contaminated by industrial processes in various industries, including power plants, desalination plants as well as the oil, gas and lithium industries. 

The idea behind evaporation ponds is to create shallow expanses of waste water which is naturally evaporated by sunlight, leaving behind solid waste which can be more easily disposed of. Read More

01.08.20- Why Is The U.S. Military Funding This New Biofuel Breakthrough?
Haley Zaremba

Trying to wrest energy from the sea is not a new trend. The science of tidal energy has been around since the 1900s, a new algal biofuel “breakthrough” is announced every year or so, and Russia has even launched its nuclear power plants out into the arctic sea where they have been labelled as a floating “Chernobyl on ice.” Read More

01.07.20- 2020: The Decade For Energy Storage
Tsvetana Paraskova

The developers of the lithium-ion battery won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2019, in recognition of a scientific achievement that has helped power our mobile phones, laptops, and electric vehicles (EVs).

“It can also store significant amounts of energy from solar and wind power, making possible a fossil fuel-free society,” The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said, noting that lithium-ion batteries have created a rechargeable world over the past decade.  Read More

01.06.20- Is This The Future Of Solar?
Haley Zaremba

Earlier this month, many of the world’s leading experts and authorities on climate change and clean energy met at the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference COP25 in Madrid to discuss the state of the world and the strategy going forward to combat catastrophic climate change. There the UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the gathered delegates and experts that “By the end of the coming decade we will be on one of two paths. One is the path of surrender, where we have sleep walked past the point of no return, jeopardizing the health and safety of everyone on this planet. Do we really want to be remembered as the generation that buried its head in the sand, that fiddled while the planet burned? The other option is the path of hope.” Read More

01.04.20- Physicists Just Achieved Quantum Teleportation Between Computer Chips
For The First Time
Manuel García Aguilar

“Quantum” may possibly have been one of the most common words we’ve been reading, listening to, and even writing about last year - and there is a big reason for that... quantum is no longer the future, quantum is now.

Physicists have been able to demonstrate quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time. Read More

01.03.20- CapEcon: If Iran Closes The Strait Of Hormuz, Crude Would Jump To $150
Tyler Durden

When we first reported the news of Qassam Suleimani's assassination, one of the first things we showed was the placement of US naval ship around the globe, emphasizing the location of aircraft carrier CVN 75 "Harry Truman" which is currently located just off the Straits of Hormuz in the Gulf of Mexico (and may or may not have been instrumental in the Baghdad airport strike that took out Suleimani). Read More

01.02.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Differeny: The Wounded Knee Massacre... The Forgotten History of the Native American Gun Confiscation
Molly Carter

This war put an end to the Indian Wars and is marked as the last official defeat of the Native Americans…

The Battle at Wounded Knee is a significant battle in American history, as it put an end to the Indian Wars and is marked as the last official defeat of the Native Americans. But what’s not taught in history lessons is that Wounded Knee was one of the first federally backed gun confiscations in the history of the United States, and it ended in the massacre of nearly 300 unarmed people. Read More

01.01.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: America Is Over But You KNEW That Already…
Doug Lynn

Should old acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
And old lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
For auld lang syne. ~ Robert Burns  Read More