It's not all bad news, especially if the economy harming derivatives market crashes and burns!

$30.00 bbl, sounds like good economic news for the west and the Saudi's who've replaced their sole reliance on crude with significant and grow refinery capacity. If only we were as smart and just value added all we export also. And doable with the right affordable energy supply. No that's not coal, hydro nor anything linked to the diabolically dumb energy wasting national grid!

Just very local micro grids, country co-ops, thorium and with that, genuine competition for market share.

Thorium also enables I believe, the Edmonton 1.8 trillion bbl to be fully developed and exploited, given something a small as a shipping container sized reactor, could provide sufficient heat at the very bottom of that reserve, to enable the industry to extract all of it as thin warm liquid, rather than tar.

Imagine the Middle East and Russia, (OPEC) without a western customer economy to bless themselves with, and possible, with walkaway safe molten salt thorium reactors that enable extraction of fuel from boundless seawater? What price oil then?

I mean with the thorium reactor, all the mass produced costs are upfront. Why the security guard out front would cost more than the fuel and the reactor once fueled could be welded shut for 100 years?

And enough time to completely deplete the massive North American reserve! However if we're still relying on oil or gas for our principle energy supplies for 9+ billion people, on the basis of carried forward as far as foreseeable, sovereign risk, we won't have to worry about winter heat! Or coastal real estate?

As for commuting to work, what about thorium powered fast ferries? Or smokey diesel ones? The new Venice of the South, the Gold coast, may be a prime candidate? Ditto Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, Perth Brisbane and Darwin.

Islands in the sun could take on a whole new perspective?

Not for nothing is it writ large, there are none so blind as those who will not see!
Alan B.

As I look around the world at hundreds of rigs, wells and refineries, I note the flares each one presents, sending thousands of annual tons of CO2 skyward!

It seems passing strange that this energy component should be routinely and massively wasted, when it's child's play to run it through a simple catalytic converter to turn in into thousands of barrels of liquid methanol. Which is an excellent substitute for petrol or avgas!

And even more passing strange if drillers/refiners are allegedly experiencing hard times and highly compressed margins? And stranger, if and when the price drops below $30.00 bbl.

A 150 litre barrel of petrol or its higher octane alternative methanol, would fetch somewhere north of $150.00 retail as liquid fuel?

And given the calorific value of a cubic metre of methane is equal to that of a litre of petrol. And any one well, rig or refinery could be pumping thousands of cubic metres of gas skyward daily? Hard to reconcile, with stories of the industry in crisis or doing it tough?

150 such wells could fill a 150 litre barrel with liquid methanol every minute? And in the case of shale drilling, from a single field or portion of same? How many minutes in a year!
840 X 365 x $150.00?

A turbo charged engine will likely perform at least as well on methanol as a naturally aspirated engine burning high octane avgas? Be it Newton metres, economy, horsepower or absolute range? Interestingly, we have copious NG, but our foreign drillers want to sell it for sixpence to foreign users?

And as dumb as dishwater, when it'd fetch a pretty penny, right here, as ready to use, petrol replacing methanol?
Alan B.

One of the reasons that the oil price has crashed is shale oil and CSG, and that now the US is largely energy independent.

Anti CSG laws are costing Aus $bns.

SM, The US is not independent they still import 40% of their fuel.

They did stop after drilling shale wells because of the costs.
Those wells will delay the problem of cost but someone has had to pay for them.
Mostly it was Wall St financiers that paid as the companies owning
the holes syop paying.
If the price falls as low as they say, then doubt I they will be able
to do better than break even. They still have to pay for the drilling.

When it all ground to a halt in January 2015 there were 1600 rigs in
operation. The numbers have since risen to a little over 600 to 700.
So you can see it is going to take much higher prices to get back where it was.