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The cannabis industry is hiding a dirty little secret
According to Evan Mills, a California-based energy and climate change scientist, the marijuana industry has a major problem...and it's likely to get worse before it gets better.
"Legislators and energy agencies have largely turned a blind eye to the carbon footprint of indoor cultivation, which already belches out greenhouse-gas emissions equal to that from 3 million cars in America," says Mills.
Renewable energy deployment stalled out last year, raising alarm bells about the pace of the clean energy transition.
In 2018, total deployment of renewable energy stood at about 180 gigawatts (GW), which was the same as the previous year. It was the first time since 2001 that capacity failed to increase year-on-year, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter and OPEC's largest producer, has influenced the oil market and oil flows since the middle of the 20th century.
Shortly after the 21st century began, one of Saudi Arabia's key customers made its first steps toward becoming one of the Kingdom's main competitors on the global oil market: the United States began fracking for oil in the mid-2000s.
Oil prices jumped to five-month highs this week, pushed higher by a bullish cocktail of supply outages, geopolitical unrest and a sputtering shale sector.
The most recent factor is the sudden eruption of the long simmering feud in Libya between rival factions. The attack on Tripoli by the Libyan National Army (LNA), a militia led by Khalifa Haftar, led to a spike in oil prices on Monday as the market priced in the possibility of supply outages.
The long awaited Saudi Aramco acquisition of Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) is finally here.
With a statement to the press, Aramco CEO Amin Nasser reported that Aramco has acquired a 70 percent stake in SABIC, with an estimated value of $69.1 billion. Aramco's CEO Nasser reiterated that the "deal is a major step in accelerating Saudi Aramco's transformative downstream growth strategy".
Global oil and gas companies are increasingly facing an uphill battle as global warming policies are taking their toll. Most analysts and market watchers are focusing on peak oil demand scenarios, but the reality could be much darker. International oil companies (IOCs) are likely to face a Black Swan scenario, which could end up being a boon for state-owned oil companies (NOCs).
Saudi Arabia isn't buying the peak oil demand narrative.
OPEC's largest producer continues to expect global oil demand to keep rising at least by 2040 and sees itself as the oil producer best equipped to continue meeting that demand, thanks to its very low production costs.
The number of drilled but uncompleted wells (DUCs) in the U.S. shale patch has skyrocketed by roughly 60 percent over the past two years. That leaves a rather large backlog that could add a wave of new supply, even if the pace of drilling begins to slow.
Oil prices regained more ground on Wednesday, pushed higher after equity markets rebounded from an initial selloff at the start of 2019 trading.
The price gains are not entirely convincing. WTI and Brent posted strong gains, each up more than 3 percent by midday in New York, but come largely after U.S. equity markets shook off an earlier bout of pessimism.
To cut and push up prices or not to cut and preserve market share, this is the question that Saudi Arabia is facing ahead of this year's December OPEC meeting. It seems like just yesterday when OPEC met in 2016 and decided to cut production by 1.8 million barrels daily, including from Russia, to reverse the free fall of oil prices.
After declining by more than 20 percent from the October peak, oil prices are showing some signs that they have now bottomed out.
Oil prices are down a bit, but are still close to multi-year highs. That should leave the shale industry flush with cash. However, a long list of U.S. shale companies are still struggling to turn a profit.
An oil price spike is starting to look increasingly possible, with a rerun of 2008 not entirely out of the question, according to a new report.
The outages from Iran are worse than most analysts expected, and bottlenecks in the U.S. shale patch could prevent non-OPEC supply from plugging the gap. To top it off, new regulations from the International Maritime Organization set to take effect in 2020 could significantly tighten supplies.
More than two weeks of nearly uninterrupted price gains for crude oil ended this week, with the rally running out of steam. The question is what happens next?
Oil prices posted steep losses just as the bulls were back on the march. WTI briefly topped $70 per barrel in recent days and Brent was flirting with $80. But the rally was kneecapped by a variety of factors, and it could be challenging to break above those key pricing thresholds in the near future.
Utah holds the largest reserves of oil sands in the United States, but up until now, no company had the technology to exploit these vast resources.
Despite the potential, "only a few companies are pursuing the price-sensitive and water-intensive development of the state's oil shale and oil sand resources," the EIA said in a 2017 report on the state, essentially writing off the region as a meaningful opportunity.
When OPEC and Russia shook on increasing crude oil production by a million barrels daily to stop the oil price climb that had begun getting uncomfortable for consumers from Asia to the United States, there was no sign of what was to come just two months later: slowing demand in Asia, ample supply, and a brewing price war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran is becoming increasingly evident in the oil pricing policies of the two large Middle Eastern producers. The two countries are currently reigniting the market share and pricing war ahead of the returning U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil.
President Trump's trade war with China, which is still in its early stages, has already battered the yuan. The dollar has gained more than 8 percent against the Chinese currency since March. As Reuters points out, in dollar terms the price of Brent oil has climbed 9 percent this year, but in yuan terms oil is now nearly 14 percent more expensive.
