O preço do petróleo, em termos de curto, médio e longo prazo e da sua previsão, comporta-se como a previsão do tempo versus a previsão do clima - é mais fácil prever qual será o clima daqui a dezenas de anos do que o tempo que fará daqui a quinze dias.
Sabemos com um grau muito grande de certeza que estamos a entrar num período de longo prazo onde os preços da energia serão altos e as causas são conhecidas. No entanto, a intensidade e a rapidez com que este surto de aumento dos preços se desenvolveu, já é mais difícil de compreender - há muitas hipóteses de explicação - como é difícil de prever o que sucederá nos próximos meses. Consegue-se perceber isso por este conjunto de artigos (há mais sob a etiqueta energia). Nestes artigos são revisitados o modo de actuação da política económica e as razões porque a descida do imposto sobre os produtos petrolíferos é uma tontice - a Manuela Ferreira Leite sabe-o.
- Why Is Oil So High? Pick a View - NYTimes.com: "People who have spent their careers tracking the ups and downs of the global oil markets say their compasses are spinning. Oil prices rise for reasons they cannot quite fathom, and where prices will be a year from now has become, literally, anybody’s guess."
- Would Oil Prices Continue to Be So High If We Got Rid of All the Speculators? "Many have blamed the rapid rise in oil prices in 2007 and the first-half of 2008 on speculators. But if we somehow banned speculators from trading oil futures and options, would the price of oil drop back down to pre-2007 levels? It is not clear that it would. The link between high oil prices and speculators is understood to work as follows: Oil analysts and traders believe that oil prices will rise in the future due to a combination of increased demand from China and India and due to slowing or even reduced supplies from "peak oil". Seeing the writing on the wall, speculators start buying up oil futures and options today, believing they will be worth more in the future. This buying up of oil futures immediately raises their price, due to basic supply and demand. The price of oil should fall once these futures mature because speculators have no need for a physical delivery of oil - where would they store it? However prices, on average, do not fall - in fact they rise. It could be because someone is buying massive amounts of oil and physically storing it somewhere, but this is highly unlikely. What is more likely is that the price is maintained high because it is being "stored" in the ground rather than making it to market; that is some oil companies are cutting production. Step 4 in the chain is the crucial one. Unless the oil is being stored by the speculators (or somebody the speculators are selling their futures to), they cannot permanently drive the price up. All else being equal, oil prices must fall as the speculators sell their futures prior to maturity. But since the price of futures are not going down (on average), then all else must not be equal - it must be that production is being cut from what it would have been. We can think of the current situation as being akin to oil companies buying the futures from the speculators and delivering the oil to themselves.Due to this, it is not clear that getting rid of the speculators would drop oil prices one cent. The high prices appear to be largely supply-side issue. How much of the lower supply is due to oil companies cutting production and how much is due to "natural" factors is open to debate.
Gavyn Davies: Life beyond the oil shock Comment is free The Guardian "... Chancellors from 1980 to 2003 basked in the good fortune of declining food and energy prices, relative to the prices of other items, and this allowed them to enjoy prolonged periods of subdued inflation, low unemployment and healthy growth in gross domestic product. They were not notably slow to take the credit. But since 2003, the entire decline in the relative price of basic commodities has been reversed and, in recent months, the shock has intensified dramatically. So far, the food and energy price surge has been entirely responsible for the rise in UK inflation from 2.1% in December 2007 to 3.3% in May this year, and if oil prices remain around $135 per barrel, inflation is headed to about 4.4% in September. Extra energy bills will subtract roughly 3% from the real living standards of British families, which is more than occurred in the bigger of the two oil price calamities in the 1970s. Let's make no bones about it: if sustained, this will be the mother and father of an oil shock. The unavoidable consequence is that oil consumers will have to accept that they are much worse off. The chancellor can choose to redistribute these losses between rich and poor, or between current and future generations, but he cannot eliminate them in the long term. Calls to drop energy taxes or subsidise energy bills are based on a fallacy. Higher energy bills must inevitably be paid either by consumers or taxpayers now, or by government borrowing, in which case taxpayers tomorrow will be worse off. ... This means that he has accepted the direct impact of the commodity price increases as a fait accompli, but that he will not allow them to be built permanently into wage increases or inflation expectations. Some people may be surprised that the governor, a renowned hawk in policy terms, is willing to permit such a prolonged period of above-target inflation, but the monetary regime always assumed that this would be the correct response to a sudden supply shock of the type we are now witnessing. "
Oil Shortage a Myth - Scitizen "...There is an essential difference between the total volume of reserves and the proportion of them that can be recovered as a rate per day: i.e. it doesn't matter how big the reserves are if they can't be tapped-into fast enough to match rising demand. This is true also of potential "abiotic oil" as is believed to be produced in the earth, according mainly to Russian/Ukranian geologists, in contrast to the prevailing view in the West. Even if the latter theory is true, the world still needs to reduce its demand for oil. "Sir: Richard Pike [CEO of the Royal Society of Chemistry is quoted ("Oil Shortage a Myth", The Independent 9-6-08) as saying there is plenty of oil left, and he is right. We should indeed not underestimate proven oil reserves but this is not the problem; the issue is flow rather than the quantity of total reserves and the quality of the oil that will be recovered from them. There may be 1,200 billion barrels worth left, but if it cannot be recovered much faster than is being done now it will not help alleviate the pressing gap between rising demand and supply. Even if Saudi were to increase its output by one million barrels a day (and it is debatable that they could) the product would be a heavy oil for which there is presently insufficient refining capacity in the world. Producing most of that remaining trillion or so barrels will be far more difficult and expensive than for the sweet, light crude oil, production of which peaked at the end of 2005. It will also be harder to turn it into fuel, requiring new refineries to be built, given its higher sulphur content and higher molecule mass hydrocarbon composition. I agree, we will be producing oil for decades and it is not running out per se, it is the cheap oil that is, and we will never see cheap fuel or chemical feedstocks again, with adverse effects for world transportation, industry and financial markets.
As I have previously noted, the only ones who benefit from the gas tax [holiday] are the oil companies and the petroleum producers. Case in point, the biggest producer just said: Next month, the Saudis will be pumping an extra half-a-million barrels of oil a day compared to last month, bringing total Saudi production to 9.7 million barrels a day, their highest ever level. But the world’s biggest oil exporters are coupling the increase with an appeal to western Europe to cut fuel taxes to lower the price of petrol to consumers. Why do they want the West to lower fuel taxes? They want to be able to raise their own prices and/or they want higher demand for their primary product: As N. Gregory Mankiw, the former chair of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, says, “What you learn in Economics 101 is that if producers can’t produce much more, when you cut the tax on that good, the tax is kept … by the suppliers and is not passed on to consumers.”
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