November Young Professionals Development Dinner:

In the next episode, Venezuela, Iran and Russia stir up more drama while China, India and Brazil continue to grow as silent giants. The United States is dealing with an internal struggle about how and which resources to develop. Is this another soap opera or reality television show? Actually, these are real issues being discussed by world leaders and our industry members. Come join SPE-GCS Young Professionals to hear Dr. Michael Economides speak about the current state of energy geopolitics.

First 100 registrants will receive a gift copy of From Soviet to Putin and Back: The Dominance of Energy in Today’s Russia by Michael Economides courtesy of BJ Services and Piper-Morgan Personnel Consultants.

Details on "Young Professionals Development Dinner - Energy Geopolitics and Russia’s Dominance in World Energy"

The past few years have been eventful in the world of energy. Oil prices climbed to $145 per barrel, expected to remain quite high for the foreseeable future. While the calculated by us equilibrium price of oil should hover around $50, geopolitical headlines rule the price and the world is constantly one headline away from far larger oil prices. There is a substantial imbalance in the location of energy producers and consumers, an imbalance that has precipitated world conflicts and one that will likely cause future upheavals. Prominent among these areas is the Middle East where five of the six countries with 75 billion barrels of reserves are located. The Straits of Hormuz through which one third of all trans-national oil trade passes is a geopolitical choke point.

Energy militant nations such as Iran, Venezuela and, over the last few years, Russia hold a considerable sway over the energy trade. Iran’s nuclear enrichment program has had a measurable impact on oil prices. In Venezuela Hugo Chávez has led a Latin American populist insurgency, has totally re-nationalized his country’s oil industry and has taken a very militant and hard-line position towards the biggest consumer of them all, the United States. Russia’s energy ascendancy over the past decade has been an important counterbalance to the power of OPEC. However, recent re-centralization of Russia’s energy industry, amounting to what we have called re-Sovietization, has given rise to what can easily be described as energy imperialism.  See www.soviettoputin.com

One obvious bright spot for the future is that energy consumption in the generation of wealth and the forms of primary energy sources have not been constant throughout the last two centuries. Of considerable significance is the change of fuels from wood to coal to oil and now to natural gas and, eventually, hydrogen will play a role. Wide use of electricity in transportation is the only obvious long-term, decades away, future.

Distorting the economically sane path to the future is the confusion deriving from the current lack of overlap between primary energy sources such as oil and natural gas and improbable ideas for alternative energy sources such as the practically energy-negative bio-fuels, headed by ethanol or, even more impractical alternatives such as solar electricity.

Compounding the issue even further is the entire rhetoric of global climate change, its presumed anthropogenic component, and the proposed solutions, bound to add to energy costs and energy availability.