Casey Research's Blog

Russia loves being in control of other countries' energy needs. The nation supplies a quarter of the natural gas consumed in Europe, owns 40% of the world's uranium enrichment capacity, and rivals Saudi Arabia for the top spot on the list of global oil exporters.

Coal. It's the energy source we all love to hate for its acid rain, smog, and greenhouse-gas generation, and yet it provides 45% of the electricity that powers the United States.

Coal prices are surging ahead even as most other commodities pull back, spurred on by expectations that metallurgical and thermal coal production will again fail to meet rising global demand this year. The result? Record profits for major coal producers like Xstrata, a surge in acquisitions from coal-hungry India, Chinese electricity shortages, and a raging carbon tax debate in Australia amid record investments in that country's coal-heavy mining sector.

Iran - the second largest OPEC producer after Saudi Arabia - produces 3.7 million barrels of oil a day. After years of insufficient investment in infrastructure, however, that output is threatened. Iran's deputy oil minister, Mohsen Khojasteh-Mehr, says the country has to invest at least $32 billion to maintain its production capacity. If it does not do so, output will fall to 2.7 million barrels per day by 2015.

What a year it has been for oil. After climbing almost steadily for 11 months, the start of May brought about a significant correction that pulled prices down some 15%, including a single-day $10 loss on May 5. What happened? The froth came out of the market.

As workers continue to battle with the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, more impacts from the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl are starting to arise. The latest impact will hit car manufacturers, with plants in central Japan hit the hardest: power firm Chubu Electric has agreed to shut its Hamaoka Nuclear Plant until it can build better defenses against the kind of massive earthquake and tsunami that hit on March 11, and Hamaoka provides power to at least 15 auto plants.

It has been a year since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank, sparking a 3.5-month-long battle to cap a gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. And gushing is the word - the well spewed 50,000 barrels of oil each day at its peak.

In a debate with $4 billion worth of consequences for the oil industry, U.S. lawmakers are again fighting about whether to scrap oil company subsidies in the face of skyrocketing gas prices.

Fracking is a drilling technique that involves pumping large volumes of water, sand and chemicals into deep shale deposits to fracture the rock and free the oil or gas. Drillers seeking to pull more oil and gas from hard rock deposits have been fracking since the 1950s, but in the last decade advancements in horizontal drilling techniques have taken fracking to a new level.

With the civil war in Libya now entering its third week, Egypt moving haltingly towards free elections, and hundreds dead in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain after a month of anti-government protests in each country, the Middle East is rife with instability.