if peak oil is imminent...

Discussion in 'Stocks' started by kapama, Dec 5, 2008.

  1. kapama

    kapama

    If you believe peak oil has been reached or only couple of years away at most, what stocks/industries would you be long and/or short right now? My choices are long solar,coal,oil services, independents and short airlines,cruiselines,trucking companies,chemical companies,refineries. Did I miss anything noteworthy? What are your favorite industries for short and long? and why?
     
  2. Peak oil? What peak oil? There's plenty of oil. Oil is going to $2/bl soon. There's no shortage of supply at all. Short oil till it's $2. Buy DUG, DTO.
     
  3. kxvid

    kxvid

    If you believe PO is imminent you should be preparing for SHTF. There are no good PO plays right now in the equity markets IMO. On the way up there should be some, but might as well bet on CL contracts. I think oil could go as low as 29 dollars a barrel, but not much lower. Keep in mind that PO is going to be twice as bad now that all alternative NRG projects got delayed and there is much less new oil production projects now the oil is so cheap.
    You might also want to 'invest' is some of the 100 things that disappear first after a crisis. I believe a generator is #1.
     
  4. Chausey

    Chausey

    Peak Oil has already happened and this is the effect, depression type behavior. Demand Destruction, yada yada. There won't be a revival of RV's, Hummers, SUV's. Dinosaurs are dying.
     
  5. market believes in peakoil

    that is why spot price is around 40 but 2017 futures is around 124 and 2011 is like 85 dollars

    Market believes in peak oil
     
  6. clacy

    clacy

    So you're saying that $124/bbl oil in 2017 would be the catostrophic scenario of "peak oil"?
     
  7. Peak oil.... it's a smoke screen for peak taxes. Taxes have increased since the 1960's, now families have to have a wife that works to meet the tax burden just to get by... people blame oil costs for that.. it's horseshit... and with Obama, well, it's his kind of horseshit, I seriously wonder if guys like him [wow a civil rights attorney probably just has such a great handle on economic realities... NOT!!] understand that there has to be hyperinflation at some point in their plan for the Nation..
     
  8. The problem with "Peak Oil" theories is the fact that they conveniently ignore the fact that as the price per barrel goes up, the amount of oil that can be profitably extracted & refined increases.

    Oil shale can be profitably processed into "regular" oil for $70-100/barrel. Known reserves of oil shale estimate that there's enough of it to produce at least 2-3 times the oil as known reserves of conventional oil... and most of THAT is in the United States.

    Wait, it gets better. The main reason the bulk of it is in the US is because the US, Brazil, and Russia have been the only places where people have actually LOOKED for it. There's increasing evidence that China has at least as much shale as the US.

    The main reason why nobody bothers with shale right now is because it's only profitable at prices of $79-100/barrel. If the market price of oil falls below it, the oil companies lose money on every barrel they produce... so they aren't going to spend significant amounts of money investing in it until they're convinced that the market price will never, ever fall below that level again.

    My favorite analogy is "Peak Wood". It occurred in urban Europe during the late 1700s, and urban America in the late 1800s. Prior to that time, wood was so abundant, people didn't even bother to worry about farming it... they just went out, found trees nobody cared about, and cut them down. Or paid someone to do it for them. As cities grew, unclaimed wood became harder to find, and people started to farm it as a cash crop. Eventually, even THAT wood became too expensive to burn, so city dwellers switched to coal.

    Hundreds of years after "Peak Wood", we still buy furniture and flooring made from wood. We even still burn it in fireplaces. The difference is that now, we buy shrinkwrapped quarter-logs for $5/ea to burn on Christmas for ambiance, and heat homes with things like natural gas, oil, and electricity. Most furniture is made from plasticized sawdust, with either a picture of wood or a thin layer of wood glued to the outside where you can see it.

    Of course, we can't forget the most important use of all for wood today: toilet paper.
     
  9. Wood is renewable, oil isn't.

    But I agree with a lot of what you stated.
     
  10. Pekelo

    Pekelo

    OK, I have a little time so I can deal with idiots...

    The problem with facts that they are stubborn things. Even a 5th grader can understand the fact of using up limited resources. Really, I tested it.
    Of course peak wood was an imbecile analogy, I won't even point it out why.
    I have more bad news for those who think that the "gravitation theory" is just a scam by airlines and elevator making companies:

    There is also peak coal and peak uranium. Really. In the USA calorie-wise coal production has already peaked. We still produce more coal than ever before in absolute volume but not in relative, calorie-terms. just so you know...

    The problem with oil shale is the rate of production. Beside being costly, it is slow....
    Using an analogy, when your house is on fire, it doesn't matter if it was built next to a lake, if you only have 2 buckets to bring the water....

    P.S.: If you are American, even your president believes in the "theory". Was he ever wrong? :)
     
    #10     Dec 16, 2008