Recently, I spoke with an admired acquaintance, Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) co-founder Joe Stanislaw, who has taken a position as independent senior advisor to the leadership of Deloitte & Touche USA's energy and resources practice. Stanislaw is more recently founder of the advisory firm The JAStanislaw Group LLC, specializing in strategic thinking and investment in energy and technology, and former president and chief executive officer of CERA. An energy advisor, strategist and commentator with 30-plus years of experience, Stanislaw has identified four global trends affecting the oil and gas industry. -- Creeping nationalism. He defines this as the rising competitive power and ambition of the national oil companies versus the rest of the marketplace. -- Access challenges. Here, Stanislaw says the real issue is: do we (foreign players with proven technologies) have access to production capacity in the big resource areas such as Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Iraq and Russia? Can capacity be developed to keep up with demand? "Technology and knowledge are as, if not more, important than money," he says. -- Energy security. Katrina focused attention on our supply vulnerabilities, but political walls create vulnerabilities in the same way. "The challenge is to avoid concentration of resources, in terms of infrastructure as well as political responses to deal with concentration of resources, i.e. Russia's [gas] supply shenanigans with Ukraine." -- Demand. The conservation message needs to encourage efficiency by asking consumers to buy the best technology, not "guilting" them to sacrifice. "How do we convince consumers to buy technology that already exists? What's the behavioral tipping point in the U.S.?" For more on this, see the April issue of Oil and Gas Investor. For a subscription, call 713-260-6441.
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