Global energy use suffers 'historic shock // The oil bankruptcies are just beginning

By Dilip -
Global energy use has been dealt such a huge blow by the coronavirus pandemic that it's like wiping out demand from all of India, a country of 1.3 billion people and the world's third biggest consumer. That's according to the International Energy Agency, which said in a new report Thursday that demand for energy could crash 6% this year if lockdowns persist for many months and the economic recovery is slow. Such a scenario is "increasingly likely," the IEA said, adding that a drop of that scale would be seven times the size of the decline following the 2008 global financial crisis. Demand for electricity is poised to plunge 5% in 2020, the largest fall since the Great Depression.

"This is a historic shock to the entire energy world," Fatih Birol, executive director of the Paris-based agency, said in a statement. "It is still too early to determine the longer term impacts, but the energy industry that emerges from this crisis will be significantly different from the one that came before." Demand for coal, oil and gas has been slammed as a result of shutdowns aimed at containing the spread of the virus, which have put the brakes on economic activity and brought international air travel almost to a standstill. Oil demand in particular could drop 9%, erasing eight years of growth....
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/30/economy/energy-demand-iea/index.html

The oil bankruptcies are just beginning
The oil crash is blocking American frackers from accessing the cheap credit that fueled their prolific rise. That reversal of fortunes could prove fatal for overleveraged shale oil companies. The downturn in the oil industry has laid bare just how much America's rise to superpower status in the energy world was made possible by easy money. Virtually unlimited borrowing allowed shale companies to dramatically ramp up production, whether that oil was needed or not. Getting locked out of the junk bond market will tip the weakest players into bankruptcy, risking countless US jobs along the way. That's what happened during the last oil crash that began in 2015...
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/30/business/oil-bankruptcies-default/index.html

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