The Great Debate

– John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own —

As OPEC ministers meet in Angola this week, they can congratulate themselves on a brilliant piece of market management.

Quick decision-making and aggressive output cuts over the last 18 months have stabilised prices at their highest level in real terms since the early 1980s. And this despite the deepest recession since World War Two.

The cartel has had plenty of help. Cheap liquidity from central banks has helped finance inventories, while continued enthusiasm from the investment community has encouraged the market to look past weak short term fundamentals and concentrate on the possibility of renewed price increases in future.

Ministers, led by Saudi Arabia’s Ali Naimi, can claim a large share of the credit: delivering timely and reasonably effective output cuts, limiting the stock build, and giving investors a reason to remain bullish.

– John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Despite a promising start, the U.S. experiment with renewable fuels is facing a serious challenge next year. Falling gasoline consumption, lower pump prices and contradictions within the federal government program are intensifying existing pressures on ethanol distillers and farmers already struggling to cope with over-capacity and collapsing margins.

ETHANOL ENTHUSIASM

Between 2000 and 2007, production of fuel ethanol quadrupled from 1.6 billion to 6.5 billion gallons, and the industry is on course to distill a record 9.3 billion gallons in 2008.

Ethanol production is not really economic at oil prices below about $60-70 per barrel (prices of grains and fats for ethanol conversion and processing costs are too high relative to oil). So the original boost to ethanol came from its use as an oxygenating additive in reformulated gasoline, rather than as fuel in its own right, when a number of states banned the use of MTBE.