LONDON, June 14 (Reuters) – ConocoPhillips Chief Executive
Ryan Lance has caused a stir by warning an audience including
OPEC oil ministers that North America could become
self-sufficient in oil by the middle of the next decade, ending
the region’s dependence on imports.

“In 1990, North American reserves and production were
falling, but thanks to unconventionals proved reserves have
risen 68 percent since then,” Lance told an audience of OPEC
ministers on Wednesday.

LONDON (Reuters) – Global financial regulators seem to have thought better about imposing ambitious new rules on physical oil markets.

Instead they are leaning towards a modest set of record-keeping requirements for price reporting agencies (PRAs) that largely codify existing practice and are in line with voluntary commitments the agencies have already given.

LONDON (Reuters) – Following recent falls, oil prices are much closer to the industry’s marginal cost, especially in North America, where light sweet crude futures are now valued at only a little over $80 per barrel.

For bullish investors, lower prices promise to provide support by threatening to curb rapid output growth, especially from high-cost tight oil and bitumen projects across the United States and Canada, as well as deepwater exploration, unless the global economy enters another tailspin.

LONDON, June 11 (Reuters) – The overdone selloff in
commodity prices, especially crude oil, has created the
potential for a strong rally once fundamentals reassert
themselves and hedge funds re-enter the market, according to
researchers at Goldman Sachs.

“We believe that the selloff in commodity prices is likely
overdone and the price risks are shifting more to the upside,”
Goldman wrote in a note published on Monday (“Commodity Watch:
Stepping back into the markets” June 11, 2012).

LONDON, June 7 (Reuters) – Politics is brutal. Just how
brutal became apparent Wednesday when Wall Street teamed up with
Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives to
emasculate the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) by
slashing its budget while imposing new requirements for
cost-benefit analysis and rule-writing.

The aim is to stop the agency implementing the 2010
Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act by
depriving it of resources needed to draft and oversee new
regulations, while erecting tougher barriers to writing new
rules.

LONDON (Reuters) – Investment behavior, jobs and growth hinge on assumptions about the long-run returns and risks that investors should expect, and these expectations rarely budge, even when they become inappropriate or unrealistic.

“The most stable and least easily shifted element in our contemporary economy has been hitherto, and may prove to be in future, the minimum rate of interest acceptable to the generality of wealth-owners” John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1936 in his landmark “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”.

LONDON, May 30 (Reuters) – Unless returns on commodity
futures and options start to pick up soon, institutional
investors may sour on the asset class and scale back or
terminate their exposure to it, ending a decade-long trend that
has seen increasing financial involvement in commodity
derivatives.

The first five months of 2012 have brought more
disappointment for pension funds and other investors with a long
position in a diversified basket of commodity futures.

LONDON, May 29 (Reuters) – With the publication of its
“Golden Rules for a Golden Age of Gas,” the International Energy
Agency (IEA) has stuck to platitudes, missing an opportunity to
develop detailed and credible standards that could speed
international acceptance for drilling and fracking
unconventional gas wells.

The golden rules, published on Tuesday, are the outcome of a
process of consensus-building led by the IEA that has brought
together governments, natural gas producers and environmental
groups to address social and environmental concerns expressed
about fracking and shale gas.

LONDON (Reuters) – If any organization has the incentive and the scale to roll out a fleet of alternative vehicles, it should be the United States Postal Service (USPS).

The post office operates the largest civilian vehicle fleet in the world, with more than 210,000 vehicles travelling almost 1.3 billion miles a year.

LONDON, May 25 (Reuters) – Widespread use of alternative
motor fuels has been hampered by lack of fuel distribution
infrastructure, despite strongly favourable economics for
alternatives to gasoline and diesel, and a range of financial
incentives offered by U.S. federal and state governments.

The U.S. federal government’s commitment to alternatives,
coupled with renewed interest among large commercial fleet
operators, encouraged by the big spread between cheap natural
gas prices and the high cost of petroleum-derived fuels, could
provide the critical mass of demand to support the roll out of a
nationwide alternative fuel system.