Peak Oil News and Message Boards

AdamB wrote:

The oil pipeline resumed operations in a matter of hours, but the war of words is heating up. Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Khalid Al-Khalifa said on Twitter that the “attempt to bomb the Saudi-Bahraini oil pipeline is a dangerous Iranian escalation that aims to scare citizens and hurt the global oil industry.” A spokesperson for Iran fired back, saying that the Bahrainis “need to know that the era for lies and childish finger-pointing is over.” The incident comes only days after a missile was fired from Yemen into Saudi Arabia, which the Saudis pinned on Iran. Meanwhile, a web of intrigue has enveloped Lebanon, the small country in which all the regional powers hope to exert their influence. Earlier this month, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri resigned and decamped to Saudi Arabia, blaming Iran and Hezbollah for putting his life and his family’s

The War That Would Transform Oil Markets

Right about now a good middle east war disrupting Persian Gilf production would do wonders for the Fracking industry and not just in North America. We on the board tend to ignore it but Russia and Argentina have been perfecting their domestic fracking capabilities for years and would benefit greatly from a world wide supply disruption.

Any war in the Middle East can be extremely disruptive to not just oil markets but the entire world economic system. If the big talkers are serious about global reset setting off a gulf war on the major scale could be the perfect excuse.

It would be foolish for Iran to start a war at this time.

All they have to do is wait a few weeks and Joe Biden will the president.

Joe has said he will quickly rejoin the Iran nuclear treaty and will concomitantly drop the sanctions on Iran.

IMHO Iran isn't likely to put that at risk by going to war now....even if they are provoked I doubt Iran will be wiling to go to war now

Cheers!

Plantagenet wrote:It would be foolish for Iran to start a war at this time.

All they have to do is wait a few weeks and Joe Biden will the president.

Joe has said he will quickly rejoin the Iran nuclear treaty and will concomitantly drop the sanctions on Iran.

IMHO Iran isn't likely to put that at risk by going to war now....even if they are provoked I doubt Iran will be wiling to go to war now

Cheers!

I don't know who might be blamed for starting the war, but really any war in the region will do. Look what the invasion of Iraq did for oil markets from 2004-2008 to see what I mean. A few carefully maneuvered attacks on oil export ports in any of several nation states would upend markets overnight.

This subject is interesting to me because it points out what is transpiring under globalization. Under globalization the oil markets have been brought round to understand the importance of the spot price. It isn't the most important thing because certain actors of some size will always hedge, but it is very important.

I believe all of the US intervention in the Middle East is pointed, eventually, at Russia. The tangle with Iran is a tangle with Russia in the sense that Iran is Russia's proxy in the region. There are tensions between the two most important factions in Islam, but there is also this. Russia's oil producing regions, and those of its southern neighbors, are being coaxed to respect the markets, and the necessity of respecting the spot price. It is a strategy designed to put pressure on Russia, possibly avoiding war. It uses the threat of war to avoid war. Go figure. Otherwise, Russia will continue to use its strategic oil position to get what it wants, purely by leveraging supply out of political machination and not by observing what the markets are telling them.

As oil begins to become less important for various reasons, the world may actually enter a period where it's become harder to use substitutes. Renewables need more time, nuclear takes a long time to build and we can't count on reduced demand to relieve our energy deficits over the long term. Smart people have known this for some time. The thing is, renewables look better now than they once did, even though they still look less than perfect. Nuclear does look like it has technological advances it could make to operate more safely. And the world can live with reduced demand, the pandemic has proven that. We'd just bump along.

If oil is still important, but not so much that it stands to crowd out whatever else is going on, why bother? Will the US, even though globalization looks re-established under Biden, seek to continue pushing into those parts of the Middle East most important to Russia, as well as threaten Russia itself? What sort of toned down version of this would be effective at this time, assuming that was the case? I don't think that Trump's attempts at a complete reversal of this are what is coming. I suppose, they could be.