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negative oil price

Considering China is in the process of building 400 new coal fired power stations the future of coal is safe for a while yet.
I was specifically discussing the North American market; but since you brought it up, world demand for coal most recently peaked in 2013, and is currently sitting at about 2.5% below that mark. Robust, Chinese funded coal appetites in Africa, India and East Asia are only enough to barely surpass the precipitous decline in coal consumption in North America and Europe.

And this was all before the recent economic disruption; a lot of those projects are not going to get completed.

But currently, the demand for coal at spot rates is steady since the bulk of it is for power generation (and we sure still need power), and maybe some folks who still burn it for heat.
Well, like I said, the current state of coal is not as immediately apocalyptic as North American crude is right now, but there is really no future in it. I'm sure areas in and around coal country, like Wyoming and Appalachia, will do their best to hang on to it, but the rest of the country has little interest in it anymore.

I mean, coal is still here, of course, and it still makes up a significant percentage of North American power generation. But demand for the stuff is close to half of what it was in the US ten years ago, putting it at levels of consumption not seen since 1960. And it has nowhere to go but down from there.
 
I would try to figure out some cheap way to produce carbon fibres from coal.

In 2016, Australia was the biggest net exporter of coal, with 32% of global exports (389 Mt out of 1,213 Mt total). It was still the fourth-highest producer with 6.9% of global production (503 Mt out of 7,269 Mt total). 77% of production was exported (389 Mt out of 503 Mt total).[4]
 
According to Bloomberg, which may or may not be a valid source for news. there are 20 million barrels of oil presently sitting off of the West Coast in tankers as there is no storage space onshore to unload them. Some have been there over a week. And some might have been chartered strictly for storage. Whoever owns the oil on those tankers coming from Saudi Arabia is going to loose some money.
 
Well, the Virus could result in a collapse of trade traffic, with a concomitant collapse of fuel sales. But H2 production is not like crude extraction that can't easily be shut off and then reopened.


With the CT trade mechanic, a really low buying price could mean there is a temporary drop in demand for the product causing a crash in the price.
 
Is that a tax write off?

Political advertizing certainly incentives individual media companies' spin on coverage.

It's certainly put a dampener on international tourism; global trade may recover on most commoditized items.

That second health passport may get reinstitutionalized.
 
I suppose if you have a Merchant Prince -oriented campaign and a PC with Gambling who is always looking for "that one big score" to tell and re-tell for the rest of his life, setting up this scenario would be fun and worthwhile. But the prep work may take so long to build up that the plot thread won't pay off.

The opening chapter would be to pick some raw material from the Speculative Goods Table and post a TNS article about a Belter discovering "a modern-day Comstock Mother Lode".
 
Where do all the belters send their goods when the interstellar trade networks shut down due to war or "Abandonment"? What do you do on an agricultural world when the ships don't show up in harvest week? Your goods rot, and you can hardly give them away. Where you were feeding a subsector you now only have 600million mouths to feed.

The destruction of all those Industrial worlds by Lucan or Virus not only means that you can't give your food away, it means when your tractor breaks you (a) can't find spares and (b) can't pay for them.

Your mining world is selling ore at Cr3000 per ton when some belter turns up two hundred billion tons in the neighbouring system at Cr2000 per ton...and they are owned by LSP! The Imperial economy is horrendously vulnerable to gluts and shortages. It must be for goods prices vary by such massive percentages.
 
Seems like the Imperium protects trade. Whether that is promotion or compulsion is flavor, no?

But I suspect it's quite easy to compel your member/subject states to do what is in the best interest of empire... Amber zoning, withdrawal of protective naval forces, starport classification...

What's the Third Imperium equivalent of pumping extracted petrochemicals back into their source?
 
The Imperium could incentivize/de facto compel trade by requiring systems to pay taxes in Imperial Credits. Assuming a local system isn't allowed to print them, the only ways to accumulate Imperial currency are either by selling goods abroad (trade) or taking investments from foreigners (capital). The thing about selling investments to foreigners, unless they are planning to live in the system, they too will want their income in Imperial Credits eventually. Which brings us back to the local system engaging in trade...
 
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It was Herbert who first made me aware that you can maintain stability by distributing production, with the example of one village manufacturing the hoe blade, and another manufacturing the wooden handle; as well as mutual dependence ensuring you remain within the political league.
 
What's the Third Imperium equivalent of pumping extracted petrochemicals back into their source?
Maybe a backwater system (or at any rate, not very developed) with an Oort Cloud composed of a curiously high number of asteroid/comets about the right size and shape to be Large Cargo Modules, left in natural orbit?
 
Going by current procedures, you don't since you can seriously damage the pumping equipment, also why they used to burn off the natural gas, since oil gets a higher price.

From what I hear, with current prices, they directly release the methane into the atmosphere since there are no regulations against it, and even if there were, the companies can always just declare bankruptcy.

Raw hydrogen seems to be the equivalent in Five Kay, and surface bodies of water and gas giants make that pretty much like open fracking, assuming no regulations nor policing agency.
 
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