New Oil Wars – New Energy’s Challenge to Old Oil
New Oil Wars – New Energy’s Challenge to Old Oil
February 12, 2016
Lots of conspiracy theories abound for oil price to have crashed in this new year to below USD 30 a barrel.
Some of the cited reasons are :-
1. US and Saudi Arabia in a conspiracy to punish Russia.
2. Slowing demand for oil, in particular from China, where 50% of the global oil exports go to. At 6.5% economic growth for 2016, China will still demand a respective size of world’s oil.
3. OPEC and US shale gas – conspiracy goes that the oil countries are pushing prices to below US 30 and causing massive bankruptcies in the shale oil business which needs oil to stay at US 60 to be profitable.
4. Iran – the return of Iran will result in a definite over supply and thus the further fall in prices.
Further to the above, what’s important is also highlight that perhaps OLD oil money is challenging new ENERGY money by drastically crashing the prices of oil to make new energy efforts not viable.
The recent ignorance of the downward adjustment of retail oil prices (ie pump prices remain unchanged) in China when prices dropped further is perhaps a recognition that low oil prices may KILL off new energy products SALE in china.
Vast amount of money – maybe more than USD 100-200 billions – particularly from China are being poured into clean energy such as hydro, solar, wind, nuclear.
China is the world leader in many of these fields today and has a strong interest to ensure the success.
Interestingly, after so many years of “investments”, none of the oil majors are heavily involved in new energy. Thus, the conspiracy goes, the Paris Accord on 12 Dec 2015 was probably a major reason for a FURTHER crash of oil prices, as oil producing countries such as US and Saudi Arabia see a big threat from the new energy efforts from China.
Hang on to 2016 as this year will certainly be as exciting or even confusing as the one just ended in 2015.
Written by
Thomas Ng