Today’s Energy Crisis Is Unlike Anything We’ve Ever Seen Before

Back in 2005, the world economy was “humming along.” World growth in energy consumption per capita was rising at 2.3% per year in the 2001 to 2005 period. China had been added to the World Trade Organization in December 2001, ramping up its demand for all kinds of fossil fuels. There was also a bubble in the US housing market, brought on by low interest rates and loose underwriting standards.

The problem in 2005, as now, was inflation in energy costs that was feeding through to inflation in general. Inflation in food prices was especially a problem. The Federal Reserve chose to fix the problem by raising the Federal Funds interest rate from 1.00% to 5.25% between June 30, 2004 and June 30, 2006.

Now, the world is facing a very different problem. High energy prices are again feeding over to food prices and to inflation in general. But the underlying trend in energy consumption is very different. The growth rate in world energy consumption per capita was 2.3% per year in the 2001 to 2005 period, but energy consumption per capita for the period 2017 to 2021 seems to be slightly shrinking at minus 0.4% per year. The world seems to already be on the edge of recession.

The Federal Reserve seems to be using a similar interest rate approach now, in very different circumstances. In this post, I will try to explain why I don’t think that this approach will produce the desired outcome.

[1] The 2004 to 2006 interest rate hikes didn’t lead to lower oil prices until after July 2008.

It is easiest to see the impact (or lack thereof) of rising interest rates by looking at average monthly world oil prices.

The US Federal Reserve began raising target interest rates in June 2004 when the average Brent oil price was only $38.22 per barrel. These interest rates stopped rising at the end of June 2006, when oil prices averaged $68.56 per barrel. Oil prices on this basis eventually reached $132.72 per barrel in July 2008. (All of these amounts are in dollars of the day, rather than being adjusted for inflation.) Thus, the highest price was over three times the price in June 2004, when the US Federal Reserve made the decision to start raising target interest rates.

Based on Figure 2 (including my notes regarding the timing of the interest rate rise), I would conclude that raising interest rates didn’t work very well at bringing down the price of oil when it was tried in the 2004 to 2006 period. Of course, the economy was growing rapidly, then. The rapid growth of the economy likely led to the very high oil price shown in mid-2008.

I expect that the result of the US Federal Reserve raising interest rates now, in a low-growth world economy, might be quite different. The world’s debt bubble might pop, leading to a worse situation than the financial crisis of 2008. Indirectly, both assets prices and commodity prices, including oil prices, would tend to fall very low.

Analysts looking at the situation from strictly an energy perspective tend to miss the interconnected nature of the economy. Factors which energy analysts overlook (particularly debt becoming impossible to repay, as interest rates rise) may lead to an outcome that is pretty much the opposite result of the standard belief. The typical belief of energy analysts is that low oil supply will lead to very high prices and more oil production. In the current situation, I expect that the result might be closer to the opposite: Oil prices will fall because of financial problems brought on by the higher interest rates, and these lower oil prices will lead to even lower oil production.

[2] The purpose of the US Federal reserve raising target interest rates was to flatten the growth rate of the world economy. Looking back at Figure 1, the growth in energy consumption per capita was much lower after the Great Recession. I doubt that now in 2022, we want even lower growth (really, more shrinkage) in energy consumption per capita for future years.*

Looking at Figure 1, growth in energy consumption per capita has been very slow since the Great Recession. A person wonders: What is the point of governments and their central banks pushing the world economy down, now in 2022, when the world economy is already barely able to maintain international supply lines and provide enough diesel for all of the world’s trucks and agricultural equipment?

If the world economy is pushed downward now, what would the result be? Would some countries find themselves unable to afford fossil fuel energy products in the future? This might lead to problems both in growing and transporting food, at least for these countries. Would the whole world suffer a major crisis of some sort, such as a financial crisis? The world economy is a self-organizing system. It is difficult to forecast precisely how the situation would work out.

[3] While the growth rate in energy consumption per capita was much lower after 2008, the price of crude oil quickly bounced back to over $120 per barrel in inflation-adjusted prices.

Figure 3 shows that oil prices immediately bounced back up after the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Quantitative Easing (QE), which the US Federal Reserve began in late 2008, helped energy prices to shoot back up again. QE helped keep the cost of borrowing by governments low, allowing governments to run larger deficits than might otherwise have been possible without interest rates rising. These higher deficits added to the demand for commodities of all types, including oil, thus raising prices.

The chart above shows average annual Brent oil prices through 2021. The above chart does not show 2022 prices. The current Brent oil price is about $91 per barrel. So, oil prices today are a little higher than they have been recently, but they are nowhere nearly as high as they were in the 2011 to 2013 period or in the late 1970s. The extreme reaction we are seeing is very strange. The problem seems to be much more than oil prices, by themselves.

[4] High prices in the 2006 to 2013 period allowed the rise of unconventional oil production. These high oil prices also helped keep conventional oil production from falling after 2005.

It is difficult to find detail on the precise amount of unconventional oil, but some countries are known for their unconventional oil production. For example, the US has become a leader in the extraction of tight oil from shale formations. Canada also produces a little tight oil, but it also produces quite a bit of very heavy oil from the oil sands. Venezuela produces a different type of very heavy oil. Brazil produces crude oil from under the salt layer of the ocean, sometimes called pre-salt crude oil. These unconventional types of extraction tend to be expensive.

Figure 4 shows world oil production for various combinations of countries. The top line is total world crude oil production. The bottom gray line approximates world total conventional oil production. Unconventional oil production has been rising since, say, 2010, so this approximation is better for years 2010 and subsequent years on the chart, than it is for earlier years.

From this chart, it appears that world conventional oil production leveled off after 2005. Some people (often referred to as “Peak Oilers”) were concerned that conventional oil production would reach a peak and begin to decline, starting shortly after 2005.

The thing that seems to have kept production from falling after 2005 is the steep rise in oil prices in the 2004 to 2008 period. Figure 3 shows that oil prices were quite low between 1986 and 2003. Once oil prices began to rise in 2004 and 2005, oil companies found that they had enough revenue that they could start adopting more intensive (and expensive) extraction techniques. This allowed more oil to be extracted from existing conventional oil fields. Of course, diminishing returns still set in, even with these more intensive techniques.

These diminishing returns are probably a major reason that conventional oil production started to fall in 2019. Indirectly, diminishing returns likely contributed to the decline in 2020, and the failure of the oil supply to bounce back up to its 2018 (or 2019) level in 2021.

[5] A better way of looking at world crude oil production is on per capita basis because the world’s crude oil needs depend on world population.

Everyone in the world needs the benefit of crude oil, since crude oil is used in farming and in transporting goods of all kinds. Thus, the need for crude oil rises with population growth. I prefer analyzing crude oil production on a per capita basis.

Figure 5 shows that on a per capita basis, conventional crude oil production (gray bottom line) started declining after 2005. It was only with the addition of unconventional oil that crude oil production per capita could remain fairly level between 2005 and 2018 or 2019.

[6] Unconventional oil, if analyzed by itself, seems to be quite price sensitive. If politicians everywhere want to hold oil prices down, the world cannot count on extracting very much of the huge amount of unconventional oil resources that seem to be…