energy security

A year ago, as New Year’s Day approached, we were looking ahead into very uncertain market conditions, having lived through a pandemic, crazy weather events, collapsing and then soaring prices, and Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine. Our job was once again to peer into the RBN crystal ball to see what the upcoming year had in store for energy markets. We’ll do that again in our next blog. But another part of that tradition is to look back to see how we did with our forecasts for the previous year. That’s right! We actually check our work. And that’s exactly what we’ll do today: review our prognostications for 2023. 

Worried about 2023? Well, you’ve got good reason to be. This year energy markets are at the mercy of a hot war in Europe, the threat of a global recession, looming China/Taiwan hostilities, the impending onslaught of new energy transition programs from recent legislation, and all sorts of other random black swans paddling around out there. With so much uncertainty ahead, predictions this year would be just crazy talk, right? Nah. No mere market murkiness will dissuade RBN from sticking our collective necks out to peer into our crystal ball one more time. Let’s hope it’s no bad bunny.

Worried about 2023? Well, you’ve got good reason to be. This year energy markets are at the mercy of a hot war in Europe, the threat of a global recession, looming China/Taiwan hostilities, the impending onslaught of new energy transition programs from recent legislation, and all sorts of other random black swans paddling around out there. With so much uncertainty ahead, predictions this year would be just crazy talk, right? Nah. No mere market murkiness will dissuade RBN from sticking our collective necks out to peer into our crystal ball one more time. Let’s hope it’s no bad bunny.

As we bid adieu to 2022, it’s once again time for the Top 10 RBN Energy Prognostications, our long-standing tradition where we look into our crystal ball to see what the upcoming year has in store for energy markets. And unlike many forecasters, we also look into the rearview mirror to see how we did with last year’s predictions. Ouch. No, we did not predict a lingering, hot war in Europe in 2022, and that had a variety of ramifications for our scorecard this time around. Even so, we actually feel pretty good about those market calls. Most turned out to be spot-on, and for the others, well, it’s informative just to see what we thought was going to happen in 2022, pre-Ukraine. Then tomorrow we’ll take on the challenge of predicting the energy markets of 2023. But today it’s time to look back. Back to what we posted on January 2, 2022.

Well, you might say energy markets got smacked upside the head in 2022. After a decade of energy abundance, a meltdown in demand in 2020, and what looked like a budding recovery in 2021, energy security had devolved into a back-burner issue. After all, why worry about existing fuel sources when they would soon be replaced by waves of renewable and sustainable fuels? Then, literally overnight, the world changed on February 24, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Prior assumptions about energy security were out the window. Suddenly, the availability, source of production and, of course, the price of traditional energy were front-and-center. In fact, those priorities swiftly overshadowed energy-transition goals. We could see that shift in focus every day at RBN by monitoring the website hit rate of our blogs to see which ones garnered the most interest. This year, all of the top blogs were in some way tied to energy security. So today we dive into our Top 10 blogs based on the number of rbnenergy.com website hits to see how energy security has permeated all aspects of energy markets.