Archives for Commodities - Page 20
The chart below, from the US Energy Information Administration, shows how fracking is effectively cash flow negative. This in turn implies that it is an energy negative process at current prices, it consumes more energy than it produces. For the year ending 31 March 2014 operational cash flow from 127…
Potash I have been doing a little research of late on Laotian potash. It is a very interesting opportunity and worth more investigation. Russian companies produce around half of the world’s 30 million tonnes of annual potash production, followed by Canada with about a quarter of total production. Laos produced…
In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days ago it was claimed that there is an “energy revolution” underway in the US. The upshot was that cheap gas & oil was luring foreign manufacturers to build factories in the US. It would also undercut Australia’s export LNG…
James Rickards (lawyer,economist, investment banker and author) has written a new book, “The Death of Money”. It is available here. In an interview with Valentin Schmid of Epoch Times (read it here), he considers that the petrodollar will be replaced by another international monetary system, just as the petrodollar…
A few weeks ago I described the relationship between gross metal value in a concentrate and the net percentage of the gross that a seller will actually receive. You can read that article here. Copper is sold in three main forms: refined copper cathode; copper concentrate; and blister copper. A…
Last week Shell announced a USD2 billion write-down of its US shale oil assets and has put its shale assets in Texas up for sale. This follows write-downs by other majors in the shale oil/gas business, such as BHP. These losses have led to a chorus of “I told you so” by shale sceptics.…