The hoopla about the Jack well in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico's Lower Tertiary trend, and the first flow of crude oil through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, are signposts of how time-consuming and difficult major oil and gas projects can be. You have to be able to ride through the commodity-price and geopolitical cycles. It took patience to bring these world-class projects to fruition. But that's a commodity in short supply in this hurry-up world where we race to meet this quarter's bottom line. We wait impatiently for a fast response to our last e-mail. From a continent away, news photos arrive on our desktop 10 minutes after an event, whether it's important or not. We are losing sight of how patience is required in life, in the oil and gas business, for investing, and certainly in the matter of geopolitics. So, commodity prices have fallen significantly. Natural gas just closed at a two-and-a-half-year low, a hedge fund implodes on a wrong-way gas-price bet, and equity investors are heading for the exits. It may get uglier this fall before it gets better. Some rigs may lie down, wells may be shut in, equities may drift lower. But winter is near. More important, the macro-factors behind supply and demand have not changed. Those in the know remain patient. For more on this, see the October issue of Oil and Gas Investor. For a subscription, call 713-260-6441.
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