Executive Summary

The Inevitable Supply Crunch
Why The Central Planners Are Making This Worse
Why The US Shale Industry Will Implode (And Soon)
The Growing Geopolitical Risks To Oil Supply
The Shock Felt Round The World

If you have not yet read Part 1: Why The Coming Oil Crunch Will Shock The World available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

As I’ve written extensively in the past, there are four entire years of missing upstream oil and gas investment (2014—2017) that will lead to an equivalent period of missing oil and gas supply sometime in the future. With the usual 5-7-year lag between discovery and production, my time frame for that was somewhere between the end of 2018 and 2022.

When -- not if -- that supply shock hits, there is no amount of fresh investment money that can rapidly bring new supply on line. Doing so just takes time -- measured in quarters or years:

As we enter into the second half of 2018, the supply/demand balance has already tipped into a slight deficit. I am clearly predicting that:

this supply imbalance will only get worse, and that
oil prices will have to rise to compensate.

The only development that could possibly prevent this from happening would be a rip-roaring recession, as only economic decline has proven to be able to reduce demand by as much as will needed to avoid this supply crunch.

As we can see from the below chart, the world has been...

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