In 2021, the whole world experienced an energy crisis: first suffering from a shortage of gas and a fivefold increase in its cost, and then suffering from a shortage of oil. Leaders of the United States, India, South Korea, and China stated that they would release their strategic reserves of energy resources, but even that could not lower the price. There were literally two corrections, but that’s it.
In 2022, the world entered with naive hope that everything would calm down – oil and gas would appear in huge quantities, prices would fall at least to the previous level, and life would become a bit easier for everyone. But, as we know, these hopes were in vain. The cost of resources continues to rise, and no one knows when it will end. What is this associated with? The main problem was that the preservation of oil resources has fallen. The reserves of oil and gas are catastrophically low even for niche giants (USA, Japan, Europe), not to mention individual countries.
Also, OPEC members are experiencing huge problems with production. Due to political crises, oil-producing countries cannot meet production quotas: in the UAE, three oil tankers were damaged in a terrorist attack, and Turkey accuses Iraq of blocking the oil pipeline. In addition to this, accidents occurred at Gazprom plants, an interconnector (underwater cable providing the transfer of excess energy from the continent to Britain) went out of order under the English Channel due to a fire at a substation, and several Norwegian gas fields went offline for planned maintenance. If you consider each case separately, everything doesn’t look very scary. However, if these factors overlap each other, we will eventually get a deadly mixture called the “Fuel-Energy Crisis”. And we did get it.
If the situation does not change, by the end of January, we may see a price of $100 per barrel. Naturally, consumers suffer the most from this: ordinary citizens and businesses. But strangely enough, there is a significant percentage of people for whom this situation is only beneficial. And we are not talking about oligarchs and global conspiracy theories. We are talking about traders who have included assets such as oil and gas in their investment portfolios. We talk about building a competent portfolio on the Adaptive course and subsequent courses.
In the near future, it is worth closely monitoring world news. The annual meetings within the World Economic Forum are coming up, numerous reports on crude oil reserves, and other information events. But still, one should not expect a miracle – the crisis is unlikely to end in the next month.
