Constant chatter about an impending oil release from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) was a prominent feature of the oil market last year. Much of the speculation was driven by the ongoing loss of crude from Iran, due to sanctions, and the possibility of a confrontation with Tehran over its nuclear program, which could have cut off traffic through the vital Strait of Hormuz. Read more »

Policymakers, analysts, and pundits regularly argue over whether countries should care about who they buy their oil from. Economist usually insist that, because markets are flexible, the precise patterns of oil trade don’t matter. Security strategists often insist that they must. Read more »

A new term has been getting a lot of play in recent weeks. The International Energy Agency (IEA) kicked things off when it projected that the United States will be “almost self-sufficient in energy, in net terms” by 2035. The idea of “net energy self sufficiency” has shown up everywhere from The Economist to Scientific American. Even a State department blog has trumpeted projected developments using similar words. Read more »

A massive cyberattack this summer on Saudi Aramco, Riyadh’s energy giant, left some 30,000-plus of the company’s computers lifeless, making a rather futuristic threat to the oil and gas industry front page news. U.S. Secretary of Defenese Leon Panetta called the attack “probably the most destructive…that the business sector has seen to date.” The Saudis weren’t the only targets. RasGas, a Qatari natural gas company, was also hit. Months later, investigators are still trying to get to the bottom of what happened, and more importantly, why it did, and what can stop it from happening again. 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 »

In today’s monthly Oil Market Report (OMR), the International Energy Agency (IEA) weighed in on how it sees the recent hostilities and pipeline tariff deal between Sudan and South Sudan affecting oil production there through 2013. This is hardly an academic question. The loss of South Sudan’s oil has been one force putting upward pressure on global prices this year, and oil is critical to the economy and stability of both countries.  The IEA’s bottom line? Don’t hold your breath for things to get much better, at least in terms of oil production, despite last weekend’s encouraging developments. And plenty can still go wrong. Read more »

What does the energy policy chattering class think about where the world is heading? The new issue of Foreign Policy has a neat feature that gives some interesting insight. The editors surveyed fifty-seven analysts (myself and Blake included) on a wide range of questions. The results are a mix of reassuring and worrying. Read more »