Saker blog poster Tirius on the oil industry.
Tirius
on September 16, 2022 · at 12:46 pm EST/EDT
Seven years ago, in 2014/2015, when the decision was taken to go green, a deliberate decision was taken to collapse the oil and gas industry. This started with the inexplicable crash in oil prices, sending many a service company into bankruptcy. Further, having done so, many rigs were sat idle or in cold storage by 2016. With funds cut to the whole upstream world, many companies were left with no option but to sell off their inventory, fleet and very specialized and expensive equipment for scrap.
A lot of rigs were sold off as scrap metal, while service tools were either auctioned or completely decommissioned. The overall consequence was the complete removal of the capacity of a very agile industry to react if needed to increase capacity. All the while CNN and the likes were hailing the US shale miracle and the nimbleness of US shale gas or oil producers, some of us who were in the industry saw the writing on the wall. The industry had been set for execution and no amount of common sense was going to help. The end was that a lot of people walked away from the industry into other trades and hey remain till today. The industry was let on a lean regime barely sustaining enough to keep the world going while the transition lasted.
Today, with the EU running around the world to seek solutions to their energy crisis, there is no single project in the world that can be ramped up to help them, be it upstream or downstream. No amount of money thrown at the oil industry can revive it. The industry has been emasculated over the past eight years, emptied out, and there is not enough manpower, enough knowledge, enough equipment or even capital to restart or kick off new projects.
That is the true story of the industry, that was built over a century, which has made the world run and enabled industrialization, despite ensuring some countries were kept as slaves and their populace destroyed so that Uncle Sam and cohorts can access their oil. Now, where we stand, anyone with in depth knowledge of the industry can only watch, albeit with sadness, as the world goes to the dogs, and the EU leads the way to the slaughter.
It needed genius to mess up so badly. And EU politicians are truly geniuses. Albeit extremely autistic ones. Nothing can convince me that the level of stupidity and arrogance shown by this lot is not borne out of the same place in the brain that drives genius.