Righteous indignations aside, the Russia-Ukraine crisis has been credited by most market watchers as the reason oil prices are “high.” We could not disagree more. Yes, we did see a very brief price jump in the immediate aftermath of this past Thursday’s invasion. The knee-jerk reaction reflected concerns about Russia’s oil and/or natural gas exports being sanctioned/embargoed
For the better part of two years, oil market volatility had at its center concerns linked to the coronavirus pandemic and, more specifically, negative impacts on global oil demand growth from isolating and containment measures. And 2020 saw the largest ever retrenchment in oil usage that eclipsed the previously worse contraction, which occurred in the aftermath of the global
Last week’s events will be remembered for many reasons but for us, the major market mover was the International Energy Agency’s admission that global oil demand is wickedly higher than what the agency was willing to admit previously. Why did it take so long for the agency to reconcile its data series? It is a mystery. You might be thinking that this is some sort of academic
It has become fashionable for many to predict the “end of oil” and the notion of “peak demand,” but we have firmly landed on the other side of the story, as discussed in a number of our columns, including the one from last week published as part of the Arab News’ special coverage of the LEAP conference. There is an economic concept called elasticity that essentially assesses
Climate change has been pushed to the forefront in most political arenas, and there is broad agreement that an evolution of energy use is in the long-term interest of our planet’s inhabitants. Who can argue with that? The issue, though like most all human challenges, is less about the desired end-result and more about the doing. Few observers are familiar with the underlying