Falling oil prices....really the work of the Saudis?

[Eddie Teach]

He'll die of heart disease in his bed.

[MadImmortalMan]

Crude back up to $50 this morning. A five buck gain on USO.

[CountDeMoney]

Crude back up to $50 this morning. A five buck gain on USO.

It's over.

THANKS OBAMA

[OttoVonBismarck]

They would need to steal some battery technology first.

... a bunch of it is available, patent free.

There have been a few very promising battery developments as well coming out of universities and such, that are likely to replace Li-ON, Li-S (Lithium Sulfur) batteries are the most promising that is likely to roll out  before 2020, and promise higher energy density than Li-ON and lower cost. There are some safety/materials science stuff that will have to be a little more fine tuned most likely.

Battery tech of course has continually improved throughout the 20th and early 21st century, but the sort of financial incentive for improved battery technology is unprecedented now, with everyone using smartphones, tablets, the growth of hybrid and all electric cars, there's no reason to assume unprecedented financial incentive won't see a boom in battery technological development.

[Berkut]

Battery tech, however, has yet to see a real, practical, transformative advance in...well, my lifetime?

It is all extremely incremental, from what I can tell.

[crazy canuck]

Very informative - thanks Otto

ditto

[KRonn]

Is there a next gen/step in technology that's in the offing? One that's affordable by everyone, not just the super rich like I think hydrogen power is.  Something that could replace fossil fuels and have much better efficiency than batteries. I've seen it said that batteries are a stop gap until other alternatives for autos are created.

On another note, I'd love to see some sort of power source that can be used in homes/businesses without relying totally on the power companies. That would also have the huge benefit of making it impossible to shut down the power grid. But that tech is certainly very far off. Has anyone heard of anything like it as a possibility? I thought I've read of something like it and maybe it's not all that far off.

[mongers]

It's difficult because we all live in such an energy intensive civilisation; I think it takes .03-.04 of a Kwh to boil just enough water to make a mug of tea/coffee.

Yet I've got a substantial laptop battery to hand rated at 6600mAh at 7.4v, which is what(no pun intended) nearly 50Wh, so that would be pretty much drain boiling just that small amount of water.

[crazy canuck]

Is there a next gen/step in technology that's in the offing? One that's affordable by everyone, not just the super rich like I think hydrogen power is.  Something that could replace fossil fuels and have much better efficiency than batteries. I've seen it said that batteries are a stop gap until other alternatives for autos are created.

On another note, I'd love to see some sort of power source that can be used in homes/businesses without relying totally on the power companies. That would also have the huge benefit of making it impossible to shut down the power grid. But that tech is certainly very far off. Has anyone heard of anything like it as a possibility? I thought I've read of something like it and maybe it's not all that far off.

The trick is to get things like this mass produced so that costs are lowered.

http://www.ballard.com/fuel-cell-products/cleargen-multi-mw-systems.aspx

[KRonn]

Is there a next gen/step in technology that's in the offing? One that's affordable by everyone, not just the super rich like I think hydrogen power is.  Something that could replace fossil fuels and have much better efficiency than batteries. I've seen it said that batteries are a stop gap until other alternatives for autos are created.

On another note, I'd love to see some sort of power source that can be used in homes/businesses without relying totally on the power companies. That would also have the huge benefit of making it impossible to shut down the power grid. But that tech is certainly very far off. Has anyone heard of anything like it as a possibility? I thought I've read of something like it and maybe it's not all that far off.

The trick is to get things like this mass produced so that costs are lowered.

http://www.ballard.com/fuel-cell-products/cleargen-multi-mw-systems.aspx

Yep, that's a good one. Some of this tech is out there now, just too expensive or not yet practical for widespread use.

[frunk]

Battery tech, however, has yet to see a real, practical, transformative advance in...well, my lifetime?

It is all extremely incremental, from what I can tell.

Battery tech has advanced a good bit, however it isn't close to as fast as computing power/memory advances which are proceeding much faster.  To some extent those gains have included reduced power consumption, but they are still resource hogs.  You could probably build a computer with a form factor of a small phone that could chew through a battery 5 times its size in short order.

[derspiess]

My buddy works for Schlumberger in Houston, which announced 9,000 layoffs this morning.  Not sure if this is the layoff he was talking about on the phone a couple days ago or a second round.  If it's the latter, I hope he didn't get the axe.

[CountDeMoney]

My buddy works for Schlumberger in Houston, which announced 9,000 layoffs this morning.  Not sure if this is the layoff he was talking about on the phone a couple days ago or a second round.  If it's the latter, I hope he didn't get the axe.

The company tells Eyewitness News they're in the process of reducing their workforce by 9,000 jobs. The reduction represents about 7.3 percent of the Houston-based company's total global workforce.

The layoffs started in the last quarter of last year, and will continue through 2015. No word yet on which specific jobs will be affected.

One would think that, in the oil sector, the first jobs to go would be the front-end production ones.   But that's not what layoffs are about.

[derspiess]

My buddy is in the Geophysics division that does geological surveying.  So his workload is determined by the number of clients that want to know how much oil is "down there" and whether it's feasible to drill.  Obviously that is going to drop off a bit, but I would think that some companies would still want to continue to poke & prod just to have an idea of where they could drill, should it become economically feasible to do it at some point in the future.

[CountDeMoney]

Yeah, I don't see the R&D types in the energy sector getting the axe of a minor market contraction.  Corporate Security, though...