As physical markets flash extreme tightness, many analysts now warn that oil futures curves no longer reflect physical reality. They argue that $100 oil dramatically understates true scarcity, masking structural shortages, geopolitical fragility, and nearly a billion barrels of lost supply behind a futures structure shaped more by financial positioning…
The thing is, electricity is not fungible with most uses of oil, gas and coal. And the current renewable infrastructure cannot be built and maintained without fossil input. High energy prices cause demand destruction. Our civilisation’s infrastructure has been built during times of low energy costs of energy (ECoE) which is in our past. So we need maintenance triage, because part by part it is going away.