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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

end of the OPEC bloc

You might not have noticed, but OPEC is dead.

A combination of shale oil in the US, Saudi and US desire to the disrupt the Russian oil-economy and Iran/Saudi rivalries mean OPEC can't set prices anymore. The best they can do is try to restrict supply enough to stop them going bust[1].

Even that isn't a sure thing anymore - no one can be sure that even that small agreement will stick[2].

An Exxon/Russia agreement under the Trump presidency will bury OPEC. (Not sure Exxon/Russia will be better than OPEC, but OPEC won't be able to do anything about it.)

[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-01/opec-get-its-cartel-mo...

[2] http://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Goldman-Flip-Flops-Aga...

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> You might not have noticed, but OPEC is dead.

Are you sure? OPEC's November 30th deal moved world oil prices drastically in every direction. For a dead entity, they sure seem to exert change upon the living.

PS: I'd love for OPEC to die also, but I think they are very much alive, albeit less relevant than 20 years ago.

To add...look at yesterdays oil price movement within 10m of this article's release: http://www.valuewalk.com/2016/12/opec-oil-cuts-not-structura...

OPEC is still alive and well, and even speculating about their deal's success is pushing prices wildly.

That's exactly the same Goldman analysis I linked to. They revised prices by $2.

This is not the OPEC who could move prices by 50% or credibly threaten to cut off supply.

They moved oil prices a few percent. If they managed to move it much more, the US and other non OPEC countries are going to increase production, because more resources become economical.

On top of that, we now have a wide range of viable plug-in cars. If oil were to get up to $100/barrel again, lots of people would switch to a car that can cover 90%+ of their driving on electricity. $4/gallon gas really hurt our SUV market, but now we can make it a 20 kWh hybrid and avoid the pain at the pump.

I didn't mean just the OPEC, I meant the oil economy itself. It is killing env + it has pushed a lot of money in the hands of people who sponsor terrorism.

Unfortunately we are likely to have some wars fought before the oil economy is gone. Plastics.

We're not going to have wars fought over plastics. What is going to start wars is the problem that several large middle eastern countries aren't water-sustainable nor food-sustainable without imports paid for by oil profits. This is part of why Yemen is at war. There's 24m people there of whom 14m are dependent on aid. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...

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