The much vaunted ‘privatisation’ of Saudi Aramco has failed to come anywhere near reaching its target, with the modest sums raised barely covering the Kingdom’s fiscal deficit for six months. It was supposed to fund Crown Prince MBS’s Vision 2030 plan to break oil addiction and diversify into everything from car plants to weapons production. With the climate backlash mounting, electric cars coming down in price and shale showing no signs of a downturn, the oil producing exporters are in trouble ahead.
The Saudis especially need revenue to pay for the cradle-to-grave welfare system, which keeps the political lid on domestic discontent; fund the world’s fourth biggest military budget and the war in Yemen and bankroll Egypt. It needs a crude price of $85 to stay afloat long term; which is at present trading $61. They are racking up debt and could unbelievably down the road run out of money.
Ambrose Evans Pritchard in the Telegraph said: ”Aramco’s flop is a sobering moment for OPEC. The world’s oil industry is on borrowed political time.”
The OPEC chart, 10 September 1960, certainly indicates major panic with a wholesale confidence slide over the next three years with tr Neptune moving in hard aspect round the Virgo Sun and then Mars and Jupiter. There’ll be a major jolt with high insecurity within months from Solar Arc Mars conjunct Uranus; and then devastating confusion in 2021/22 from Solar Arc Pluto conjunct Neptune.
Saudi Arabia was always going to be right in the heart of the Saturn Pluto storm with its Saturn, Sun, Jupiter, Ascendant in Capricorn catching it head on. Tr Pluto has been conjunct Saturn this year for an uphill struggle with the Saturn Return this December bringing a sharp reality check. Quite what effect tr Saturn Pluto on the Saudi Sun Jupiter isn’t clear except that it’ll force them to pull their horns in and rein in that extravagant confidence of theirs. Saturn Pluto is about deprivation, hardship and austerity as well as repression. All things are comparative of course but the kingdom will be forced to exercise even more restraint in future.
In 2020 as well from July onwards tr Uranus will square the Saudi Mars which will shaft a spear through their self-esteem perhaps bringing an over-reaction. Uranus Mars can be explosive. Even before then tr Uranus square the Saudi Mercury over the New Year and through January is likely to bring sharp words. There’s a financially lacklustre and disappointing Solar Arc Venus conjunct Neptune in 2020 along with tr Neptune square Pluto and Uranus – sapping power and influence.
MBS’s personal chart, 31 August 1985, also indicates a fair upheaval across this New Year and January 2020 from tr Uranus opposition his focal point control-freak Pluto. He’ll get better news from mid year with tr Uranus square his Jupiter. Bu then runs into a grinding-to-a-halt Solar Arc Pluto square his Sun in late 2020/21; and is facing failure in 2022 with Solar Arc Mars square his Neptune.
Changing times.
I wonder also if we might not expect some development, restriction, or even event in the nuclear field with Saturn-Pluto? Pluto’s rulership here meeting the double reality of Saturn in Capricorn? Jupiter swings by too for a boost too, anyone aware of significant alignment with the Saturn-Pluto cycle for this most Hadean of industries?
Am confident that the Industrial Age Chthonic fuels coal continues its decline, and oil will begin with this conjunction (through weaker demand = lower price pressure), but maybe there’s something different for this realm? Thoughts?
Brazil’s auction of offshore oil assets in November 2019 was also a failure. It only sold 2 out of the 4 blocks on offer with the only foreign bidder being the Chinese. Oil has always been a boom and bust business but the trend of each cycle now seems to be downward.
Yesterday I read about Bill Gates has a secret energy startup, Heliogen, that uses concentrated solar energy to exceed temperatures to exceed 1,800° F. This process can replace the use of fossil fuels in many energy dependent industries like cement production, steel and petrochemicals.
This could be really bad news for anyone that associated with big oil and possibly electric companies.
There’s a lot going on here. The Neptune transit to OPEC’s sun etc looks like a secular repricing of oil, lower. Efficiency, electrification of transport, and lacklustre growth is looking like it could very well good flip marginal oil demand flat, or even into a slight decline. Either of which will be devastating for oil price. Price is set at the margins, so even as the world remains structurally addicted to the black stuff, that hugely expensive industry needs constant demand growth to keep upward price pressure. The west is post peak oil demand, China has been the demand engine this century, but aggressive transport electrification has clipped that source, which leaves India and a few other emerging economies as OPEC’s only hope. The Party is over, thankfully.
The KSA looks like it’s about to slide into the biggest ever resource trap in human history; that paradoxical condition where the presence of a huge resource somehow manages to entrap a country into debt and penury. It’s going to have to stop spending on western military toys. The Uranus-Mars transit suggests an event, an attack, some sort sudden surprise to shock it out of its delusions….
Anyway, the beginning of the end of oil is a huge world changing thing, it can’t come soon enough. It built the 20thC world order, the endless middle eastern wars, the mountain of plastic, the primacy of the car. Bring on the more diffuse, more widely available, more democratic even, electron age. Is this one of the gifts the Saturn Pluto conjunction is bringing us….? Saturn restricting plutonic oil?