One interesting feature of the U.S. hydrocarbon boom is the widening gap between the industry’s interest in drilling for oil and other liquids versus dry natural gas. It’s all about economics: the disparity in prevailing market prices and outlook between these commodities is dictating companies’ willingness to sink money into, and bear the risk of, trying to produce them. Read more »

A story on NPR yesterday morning, “The Downsides of Living in an Oil Boomtown,” had an interesting portrait of the economic effects of high oil prices and booming oil production on Williston, North Dakota. The frenzied pace of job creation has led to high wages but also high turnover. A leap in demand for local goods like housing has caused massive inflation in housing prices and day care services. A similar story could be told of many other rural communities in states like Pennsylvania and Texas where the ramp up in oil and gas drilling activity has been a sudden shock on an otherwise rather static business scene. Read more »

What’s roiling the oil market right now? The old familiar source of instability—unrest in the Middle East—is far from the whole story, though it still tends to be the first place Western pundits look when the world’s most important commodity is in turmoil. But this paradigmatic hangover from the 1970s has become less and less adequate. Read more »

Markets thrive when information is cheap, abundant, and reliable. This rule holds true for all sorts of markets, from housing to stocks to energy. More transparency in energy markets makes them better able to respond to supply-and-demand signals and makes pricing more efficient. Read more »

In an op-ed I wrote for the Houston Chronicle on Friday, I tried to distill some of the policy lessons from my major new study on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was published by CFR last week. Read more »

As anyone who follows the oil market knows, speculation is rife that the White House may soon decide to tap the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). Whether they will remains to be seen. But before officials in the United States and other International Energy Agency (IEA) member countries take any action, it’s crucial they weigh the lessons of last summer’s release of national oil stockpiles. Read more »

The U.S. Energy Information Adminstration (EIA) published its Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) on Tuesday. This report is one of three official monthly sources of data and forecasts that energy analysts often look to in order to understand market conditions. (The International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) release similar reports with their own numbers.) Read more »

It is nearly impossible to read a pitch for expanding U.S. oil and gas production without being confronted with impressive estimates of how many jobs it will create. Wood Mackenzie has estimated that expanded oil and gas production could support 1.4 million new jobs by 2030. Citigroup has claimed an upside potential of as many as 3.6 million jobs from new oil and gas production by 2020. Read more »

The boom in U.S. oil and gas production has sparked talk of a manufacturing renaissance. I mentioned that somewhat skeptically last week in the context of a much broader piece on the excitement surrounding surging U.S. oil and gas output. I want to drill down on five important issues here. Some of this thinking is preliminary, so as always, feedback is most welcome. Read more »

I was worried that my defense of speculation in the oil market, published this week on ForeignAffairs.com, was late to the game, but my timing turned out to be right on. Just yesterday, an op-ed appeared in the New York Times by Joseph P. Kennedy arguing that “pure” speculators should be “banned from the world’s commodity exchanges.” Read more »