I don't know the details of Shells problems just what I read in the headlines. The larger problem is more than a few comments that Saudi Arabia and the old USSR may not have as much oil as people think either. Without any convincing data, I have to believe the price of oil, $42/barrel might be telling us something. When these sorts of problems arise there is always a tendency to scapegoat, it is the oil companies, the trilateral commission, environmentalists, Arabs, and so on. Not that some of these groups might not be making a bad situation worse and profiteering but they have to have a scarcity to start with.
The other reaction is magical thinking. Cold fusion will pull us out. Infinite energy from perpetual motion machines. Petroleum is not dead organic material it is abiogenic. I remember that theory that the center of the earth is full of methane and outgassing steadily. May even be a grain of truth in it. But it failed a crucial test. When several countries drilled deep wells in theoretically ideal areas, there was no treasure trove of abiogenic methane. I remember one where the Swedes drilled a deep well thru granite on the basis that it was in a thin area of the crust. They ended up with a deep well in granite and that was it.
I don't think we will just suddenly wake up one day and say, hey half the worlds oil is gone, prices will always go up. There will be fits and starts, corrections and spikes, just like any market. But over time the trend seems clear. Coal could also be a good buy as it can substitute for some uses of NG/oil. I know a bit about the oil biz, very little about the players in coal.
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