I don't recall too many folk hunting steam engine bargains, when diesel and diesel electric replaced steam!

As for bargain hunters, it's their money and their fingers if they get burned!

Me, if a had a few spare millions, I'd be investing new battery technology-biogas production-large scale solar thermal projects!

While it's true it's hard to lose on energy? It's also a case of a fool and his/her money are soon parted!

The next sector? How about the electronic highway, high performance extended range, affordable electric cars, vastly improved battery technology; and last but not least, algae based fuel production, where all there is, is ever increasing sustained profitable production and prices traditional oil production cannot get close to!

And better any day of the week, than crash and burn, chasing easy money and a quick quid! Only to see dreams disappear to be replaced by diabolical disaster!?

A fool never learns! Doing what you've always done, while expecting a different result is madness or conformation of blind blathering insanity!

Sucking profits out of finite reservoirs, simply and eventually results in end of production!

Whereas biological based production or manufacture, can grow a virtually inexhaustible bottomless pit, filled with ready to market as is and unrefined, diesel or jet fuel!

And where the biological waste from that production, is eminently suitable for low cost, food and arable land free, ethanol production!

And where the waste from that ethanol production may be used in digesters to produce copious biogas(methane) and total self sufficiency in all fuel types!

None of which will ever require costly carbon creating refining! Just myriad profitable byproducts!

Its not rocket science and you don't have to be einstein? Just joe average and still able to use the brains you were born with!
Alan B.

The major problem for all oil companies is that;
Goldilocks is Dead !

What I mean by that in the two forms of oil production, crude oil like
Saudi Arabia and many other places produce as they have for years,
and the tight fracking oil have two different price structures.
The crude oil, while it is declining at about 4% a year has a low cost
said to be $20 to $30 a barrel and the tight oil which has a much
more expensive cost at above about $50 to $100 a barrel.
One price is too low for the frackers and the other is too high for the economy.
So there is no "Just Right" price for all oil.

The tight oil is also of less value to the refineries because of its
characteristics and produces less petrol and diesel.
The "Peak Oil" proponents predicted that the oil price after peak
would be very volatile and so it proved to be.
There has been two spikes in price since peaking and maybe there will
be a third, who knows ?

It is a bit more complicated than it seems in that deep ocean drilling
is very expensive as is oil sands production.
It all will depend, I suggest, on the Wall St financiers.
Are they game to give more money to the frackers ?

Goldilocks had three bears who lived in Russia. The gurgle is the Reserve Funds draining out from the oil oligarchskis nyet. Less than 1 year to rock bottom ground zero and Russia is tanked , in the 2nd meaning. Goldilocks ate it all up. Maybe the Kremlin tanks get priority fuel and maybe Putin pulls his head in , his army, navy and air force.