Cold fusion has since its inception some 26 years ago always been identified as a potential Black Swan for the world of energy.

Now Saudi Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi who is arguably the most powerful oilman on Earth has revealed the Kingdom’s concern for the arrival of just such a Black Swan.

Black Swan is the name given to a totally unexpected event that changes the reigning norm radically. Black swans are not the harbingers of gentle slow change, on their wings comes abrupt crashing change so dramatic that little of the old ways remain. Black swans are always a surprise that apparently “no one” saw coming and as a result, they are only explained after the fact. But when you are seeing something happening that is incredibly dramatic and unexpected you may be sure it just might be the arrival of a Black Swan.

The Black Swan that arrived in 2008 was the bankruptcy of giant investment bank Lehman Brothers and the economic chaos and crash associated with the dark banking, investment, and real estate practices that were its characteristic black feathers.

It surely now appears that the idea of a black swan event crashing present day prices of oil has many of the key avian characteristics. Where the price of oil ends up is, of course, the all-important consequence but what is producing this collapse of oil prices and coincident refusal of all oil producers to cut back on their pumping of oil out of the ground and sale at any price as fast as they can is the real question.

Saudi Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi says Kingdom is aware of and prepared for an oil industry Black Swan

In a paper written by economist and oil industry expert Philip Verleger reports, the Saudi Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi was said to have asked the rhetorical question, “Is there a black swan that we don’t know about which will come by 2050 and we will have no demand for oil?”  Against the backdrop of oil’s recent plunge, Mr. al-Naimi was addressing potentially disruptive trends including new technology and efforts to cut carbon emissions. As for his using 2050 as a time frame, that’s pure ‘cover ones ass’ market spin, as to speak of such a distant time in the context of present oil market collapse makes no sense at all.

This is indeed a very interesting question which the oil minister posits as a seemingly rhetorical one. But the reality is that mounting evidence shows that there is clearly a very large black swan not on some distant horizon but very near that has the capability of completely evaporating global demand for oil. Saudi Arabia’s Ali Al-Nami has good reason to be alert such black swans as his nation has the largest volumes of oil in the ground and can pump those barrels of oil onto tankers faster and at the lowest cost of any oil producer on earth. Many believe they may be doing so now.

West Texas Crude Price – click to enlarge

Just how desperate is the rush to pump and dump oil assets before they are stranded in the ground forever? In 1970 a barrel of crude oil averaged about $13 a barrel. Adjusted for inflation, that same barrel of oil should be valued at about $78 today. Instead, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil is being traded at well under $50 a barrel and shows no lack of downward momentum. Much talk is of the price dropping well below $40 a barrel. If that’s not the characteristic of panic selling by those in the know and holding a soon to be stranded asset we’d all have to be blind or belligerent.

Indeed there may be a pair of black swans on the wing looking for a place to land amongst us.

There are clear indications that investors are working to distance themselves as much as possible from fossil fuels. Why they might be doing this is, on one hand, the not so unexpected slow change driven by a growing awareness of the damage to the planet wrought by the burning of fossil fuels and the widespread response to do something about it whether that be conservation of energy efforts or development and promotion of alternative energy. But these green revolutionary efforts don’t really qualify as being a black swan as they are so long and slow in coming and more or less offering very predictable pathways for society to change its ways.

It’s hard not to think of a more just reward to the physics establishment for its intransigence than for Cold Fusion/LENR to make big news as a black swan helped by an aging Russian scientist replicating and confirming in his modest Moscow lab a device that was invented by a petulant Italian inventor with a colorful past.  click to read more

What the Saudi oil minister is surely talking about when he uses the words Black Swan is a truly unexpected and rapid technological energy revolution, one harbinger of which is pictured to the right.  The ‘cold fusion black swan’ is what Bill Gates, the richest man in the world and father of Microsoft (which surely qualifies as a black swan) has recently taken enough interest in to go and personally visit in Italy, just before Christmas.

Or Al-Nami might have noticed a black feather falling from the sky in the form of this recent patent filed by European mega-corporation AIRBUS on its cold fusion engine design(s) that is making smart people in major industry look up at what is in flight.

COLD FUSION magazine covers 1989 prepared the world for an energy industry Black Swan.. The energy industries reaction was as unrelenting in working to destroy cold fusion as one might imagine. Click to enlarge

While cold fusion continues to be demeaned and dismissed in popular media, the persistently blatant oily black lies prevalent in the pop media start with that it has never been repeated since its first announced discovery back in March of 1989. From there it gets worse and the lies about cold fusion are of notorious and obvious intent, demonstrable as lies in seconds courtesy of the likes of a quick Google search. Only fools and devotees of ‘mumbo dumbo’ believe the disinformation perpetrated by the spin masters.  Clearly, Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi of Saudi Arabia and Bill Gates are neither such fools nor ostriches with buried heads and have not been taken in by the spin.

Energy Game Wild Card In Play Now

The wild card that is complicating the understanding of global energy supplies, especially oil and gas supplies, is now seen to be the rapidly developing COLD FUSION and LENR technologies. Keeping such a remarkable scientific fact of Nature and its technological potential down could never last forever.

It’s called “COLD  fusion” because the reactions are observed to take place at temperatures ‘colder’ than that inside of the sun and stars the blazing million+ degree environment of “HOT fusion.” Cold fusion can still be plenty hot with reactors now operating at temperatures in excess of 1000º C, that will run a jet engine, a major steam plant, and more.

Italian Engineer Andrea Rossi standing inside his multi-megawatt power plant now in operation providing power to the production line at a large US industrial operation… not some laboratory pipe dream but cold fusion energy making more profitable products today!  click to read more

Today around the world small teams of engineers are building and demonstrating open source cold fusion energy six ways from sundown that yields energy from the fusion of hydrogen with NO dangerous or radioactive by-products.

Cold fusion nuclear reactors are said to be capable of producing megawatts of power and replacing major power generation facilities are being hand-built by small teams of workers, 3-6 people.  Some inside the space of a 20ft standard shipping container using components purchasable at any local hardware store. The fusion fuel comes from the hydrogen in H2O, that’s just water. One part in 6000 heavy hydrogen is found in nature.

The cost of cold fusion energy in a barrel of oil equivalence… likely not more than a penny a barrel. As they used to say at the start of the atomic age – energy too cheap to meter!