Bethany McLean: Fracking just borrows money, doesn't really earn any

I've been a fan of Bethany McLean since reading her books on Enron and the financial crisis:

Both are excellent! Today I just read an excerpt in the New York Times of her new book on fracking:

... supposedly the fracking industry has sold to Wall Street and borrowed since 2008 on the idea of fracking riches, but so far it's mostly just an idea ...

See my previous post on this subject ...

I'm still driving a Nissan Leaf and feeling better about this all the time ...

Natural Gas: not a 100-year supply after all?

I was in Cle Elum, Washington at a coffee shop with a Little Free Library, where I found this book:

Basically the author goes through a lot of data that seem to show that the natural gas supply estimates that have been discussed in the media the last few years (particularly the "100-year supply") are wildly overblown.

Aubrey McClendon and Boone Pickens were two of the promoters of the "100-year" idea ... McClendon died earlier this year in what looked to be a suicide (single-vehicle car crash) the day after he was indicted for bid-rigging shenanigans in the leasing of natural gas fields. Pickens is still alive and still promoting natural-gas-powered cars ...

There's somebody near Cle Elum promoting this book; I got a copy from the Cle Elem library and read it while in Leavenworth at the Sleeping Lady  ... where I left it in the library there.

We stopped back in Cle Elum on our way home ... and there was another copy of Powers' book on the shelf!

So a possible trading idea: Buy natural gas futures (/NG) and sell calls against them, at least until nuclear fusion starts to work :-)  (See Tastytrade for more trading ideas ...)

Peak oil not quite yet and natural gas a cushion

I haven't been updating this blog for quite a while but I certainly was surprised

that the price of oil crashed so hard last year and I wish I had started

trend following before then!

I still think that oil will be getting short of supply in the next few years, but the

recent huge discoveries of natural gas should be an alternate energy

source that we can rely on as oil declines and before solar hydrogen and other

long-term technologies take hold.

I'm also interested in the electric cars coming out in 2010, especially the

Nissan, Mini and Aptera models. (Anybody reading this who's test-driven

an Aptera, please post!)