Saudi Arabia has a big advantage because its oil is cheap to produce and largely unregulated. The same cannot be said about the United States, where the shale oil industry is being slowly asphyxiated by the collapse in oil prices over the last two years.
The new Saudi oil minister, Khalid Al-Falih, says the oil glut is over. That means the kingdom’s war against U.S. shale producers is coming to an end, too.
The former president of Shell Oil sits down with the oil-and-gas magnate T. Boone Pickens to talk about the growing demand for oil around the globe. “I would say that as the world consumes more oil,” Hofmeister said, “we’ll never have enough oil for everybody, and that we’ve got to have natural gas as a transportation fuel.”
Pity the poor petro-states. Once so wealthy from oil sales that they could finance wars, mega-projects, and domestic social peace simultaneously, some of them are now beset by internal strife or are on the brink of collapse as oil prices remain at ruinously low levels.
Our dependence on oil has a sinister side that we tend to lose sight of: Some of that oil we consume — 18 million barrels a day in the United States alone — provides a revenue source for extremist groups to carry out deadly terrorist attacks.
Natural gas normally gets a great deal of attention as a feedstock for power generation: As the U.S. makes the gradual transition from coal, natural gas has taken center stage in the spotlight because it burns more cleanly than coal. Read more →
Low wages proffered are another reflection of the challenges faced by a terrorist group that has seen steep drops in revenue from oil sales as well as the physical destruction of some of its cash holdings.
Saudi Arabia, crimped by low crude prices, approved Monday a long-term blueprint for the kingdom’s economic transformation aimed at reducing its dependence on oil.
As President Barack Obama departs on his fourth visit to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for a summit with Gulf Arab leaders, ABC News takes a look at some of the issues that have brought tensions between the old allies to an all-time high during this administration.
The so-called Islamic State has lost 26 percent of the income it had been generating from the sale of crude oil, according to new research released on Monday.
