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European utilities like E.On of Germany have announced plans to shut down less-polluting natural gas-fired plants that have been undercut by dirtier coal-burning generators benefiting from a flood of low-cost coal imports and low carbon emissions prices.

Despite the upfront costs associated with green energy projects, they are inexpensive to run. In contrast, Europe’s gas and coal plants, which also provide backup power when renewables cannot operate, need constant spending on fossil fuels.

Water-assisted fracturing has been in use since the late 1940s, but it became “fracking” only recently, when it was married with horizontal drilling and the advanced sensing techniques that let it be used deep underground. Energy costs are surprisingly small; a Swiss-American research team calculated in 2011 that the average EROEI for fracked gas in a representative Pennsylvania county was about 87—about six times better than for Persian Gulf oil and 16 times better than for tar sands. (Fracking uses a lot of water, though, and activists charge that the chemicals contaminate underground water supplies.)

and pollution that kills more than 10,000 Americans a year (that estimate is from a 2010 National Research Council study).

In mid-March, Japan’s Chikyu test ended a week early, after sand got in the well mechanism. But by then the researchers had already retrieved about 4 million cubic feet of natural gas from methane hydrate, at double the expected rate.

How much of Venezuela’s oil wealth Hugo Chávez hijacked for his own political purposes is unknown, because his government stopped publishing the relevant income and expenditure figures. Similarly, Ross points out, Saddam Hussein allocated more than half the government’s funds to the Iraq National Oil Company; nobody has any idea what happened to the stash, though, because INOC never released a budget. (Saddam personally directed the nationalization of Iraqi oil in 1972, then leveraged his control of petroleum revenues to seize power from his rivals.)

And then there’s the Chinese. They arrived like a well-packed picnic, everything in shipping crates ready to be unpacked. Their own materials, their own equipment, their own workers, their own fences. If you were designing a foreign investment not to benefit the host community, this is what it would look like.

But even if Zambia was run by a coalition of charitable technocrats and Mormon philanthropists, that wouldn’t solve the most fundamental problem of all: There simply isn’t that much money to go around.

And that’s just the bureaucracy. Then there are the cops that pull you over to ask for 50 kwacha ($10); the schools with slots reserved for paying parents; the hospitals that swear the earliest appointment, the only available medicine, is six months away until you reach into your pocket.

Steel makers argue that they still have advantages in price — aluminum can cost as much as three times more — and flexibility, both for the manufacturer and the mechanic who will be fixing the car.“When you build a mass-produced vehicle, you really need to think about the consequences of the supply chain and repair and insurance costs,” Mr. Dey said.

Ford Motor Co. (F) (F) said at the end of last year it will increase capacity near Valencia as it shuts plants in the U.K. and Belgium.

In Ireland, U.S. companies such as EBay Inc (EBAY) (EBAY)., Google Inc. (GOOG) (GOOG) and Facebook Inc (FB). all have expanded in the past two years, taking advantage of a corporate-tax rate of just 12.5 percent compared to Spain’s 30 percent.

reducing social- security payments

aising the retirement age, making it easier to fire workers in downturns and preventing unions from clinging to boom-time wage deals.

The smaller trade imbalances really reflect a collapse in demand for imports as consumers and companies hunker down,

It’s the mirror image of the euro’s first decade, when historically low interest rates in the periphery fueled inflationary spending booms, reflected in credit bubbles and deteriorating current accounts and government budgets.

“At this stage it is still demand destruction which has helped current-account deficit countries balance their accounts,” said Mayer. “It’s not a healthy situation.”

They also say countries will need to run even healthier current accounts than now if they are to stabilize the debts they owe abroad.

Rick Manner, a vice president at consultancy KBC Advanced Technologies who has contributed to gas-to-liquids studies for Sasol and other companies, estimated that the projects must keep capital costs at $100,000 for every barrel a day of production capacity to be worthwhile economically at current prices of about $100 a barrel for oil and $4 per thousand cubic feet for natural gas.

Mr. Louw, Sasol’s Qatar president, said that the Oryx plant was designed to be profitable with oil at $25 a barrel. That implies a very low long-term price for the natural gas feedstock. He would not specify what Sasol pays its Qatari partner for gas, but he said it was “not zero.”

"Supertankers" are the largest tankers, including very large crude carriers (VLCC) and ULCCs with capacities over 250,000 DWT. These ships can transport 2,000,000 barrels (320,000 m3) of oil/318 000 metric tons.[46] By way of comparison, the United Kingdom consumed about 1.6 million barrels (250,000 m3) of oil per day in 2009.[47] ULCCs, commissioned in the 1970s, were the largest vessels ever built, but the longest ones have already been scrapped; only a few ULCCs remain in service, none of which are more than 400m long.[48] Because of their great size, supertankers often can not enter port fully loaded.[28] These ships can take on their cargo at off-shore platforms and single-point moorings.[28] On the other end of the journey, they often pump their cargo off to smaller tankers at designated lightering points off-coast.[28] A supertanker's routes are generally long, requiring it to stay at sea for extended periods, up to and beyond seventy days at a time.[28]

As demand grew moderately in the United States and Western Europe, expanding economies such as China fueled exponential growth in demand.[60]

The average one-year time charter rate for a 5-year-old tanker of 280,000 metric tons of deadweight varied from $56,500 per day in December 2005 to $53,000 per day in September 2007 with a high of $64,500 per day in September 2006.[59]

Moving beyond economics, America’s reduction in net energy imports – which have already fallen by one-half since 2007 – means that its foreign policy will be less constrained by events in the Middle East. In Europe, the new technology could similarly break Russia’s politically troublesome stranglehold on natural-gas supplies.