We are at the foothills of a multi-year boom cycle in oil prices: Robert McNally, Founder & President, Rapidan Energy
biggest energy producers, and countries like India, the biggest consumers. Crude oil prices had shot up more than three times during the 1990 Gulf War. In a wide-ranging conversation on ET’s The Morning Brief podcast with Arijit Barman Robert ‘Bob’ McNelly, Founder and President of Rapidan Energy, talks about the volatile energy economics and geopolitics.
McNelly has seen conflicts from up close.
He was the former senior energy advisor on both the National Economic Council as well as the National Security Council of George Bush Junior’s White House administration and between 2001-09, Robert was part of the US government that saw the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, which eventually led to the 2nd Gulf War. Edited excerpts.
Q: Going straight into the world we live in. You know, we've already seen unprecedented global volatility. starting from Covid and now West Asia is on the boil. The United States and others are desperately trying to contain the conflict, but every day there is a new development. Has 2022-23 been among the most volatile years you have seen in recent times?
Robert McNally: The answer is yes.
We have an expression in the financial markets, a black swan. Black swan events, black swans being, as you know, a rare event that has outsized implications. These days, the sky is full of black swans.
It's no longer rare. Covid, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the oil price spike it caused last year, a war getting going in the Levant and hopefully it will not spread to the region, but there's every risk that it might. On top of that, 40-year highs of inflation, central banks raising rates, all this occurring when the world was, as you mentioned, hoping to go to the UAE and Cop28 and talk about a sort of
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