Trend: The oil in the ground will not have an easy and peaceful transport to the consumers who need it most in the future.
Jeff Vail at Energy Intelligence writes that “above-ground factors”, driven by the geological reality, will accelerate the decline in global oil production beyond that predicted by models derived from logistics curves. Excerpts below.
Link: Jeff Vail: Energy Intelligence
...geopolitical side-effects of peaking global production will accelerate the rate of production decline, as well as increase the impact of that production decline by simultaneously increasing marginal demand pressures. The result: the right side of the global oil production curve will not look like the left…whatever logistics curve is fit to the left side of the curve (where historical production increased), actual declines in the future will be sharper than that curve would predict.
1. Return on Investment: Increased scarcity of energy, as well as increased prices, increase the return on investment for attacks that target energy infrastructure. up the price, which further increases the ROI for such attacks.
2. Mercantilism: To avoid the dawning “bidding cycles” between crude oil price increases and demand destruction, Nation-States are increasingly returning to a mercantilist paradigm on energy. This is the attitude of “there isn’t enough of it to go around, and we can’t afford to pay the market price, so we need to lock up our own supply.”
3. “Export-Land” Model: In a regime of high or rising prices, a state’s existing oil exports brings in great revenues, which trickles into the state’s economy, and leads to increasing domestic oil consumption. This is exactly what is happening in most oil exporting states. The result, however, is that growth in domestic consumption reduces oil available for export.
4. Nationalism: ...it is often the case that a nation is cut out of the benefits from its host state’s oil exports. This will be especially apparent when the “export-land” effect reduces the total size of the pie to be divided. As a result, nations or sectarian groups within states will increasingly agitate for a larger share of the pie.
5. Privateering: Nationalist insurgencies and economies ruined by the downslide of the “export-land” effect will leave huge populations with no conventional economic prospects. High oil prices, and the willingness to make high protection payments, will drive those people to become energy privateers.
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