No. 45 was not the bottom. As the EU continues to collapse due to the EURO crisis global industrial output will continue to fall and with it demand for energy. There are really no factors in favor of rising prices for quite some time Tony. The little ups and downs you're seeing now are (I think) traders adjusting their positions. There is a lot of ANXIETY in the energy industry right now. The layoffs are starting. More rigs are getting stacked every day. The only drilling that will be taking place are key core sweet spots and those leases facing a drilling deadline. It's going to get much worse before it gets better.
Baker-Hughes laid off 9,000, Schlumberger laid off 7,000 and these are just the big boys you hear about. The Saudi's are insisting on keeping or increasing their market share and believe that they, being an "efficient" producer should be the last to shut in production, meaning the sharp rise in American shale operations have them spooked---big time.
China has been leasing every VLCC ( very large crude carrier) that is available to buy all it can on the spot market while it's cheap.....BUT!!!!......they can only store so much. That also contributes to the problem , when you have more production than can be refined or stored, pretty soon you run out of storage. After that point is reached you can't sell oil...PERIOD. When there is no place to go with it you stop producing it. When you stop producing it you damn sure don't drill for more except in those instances noted above. Very few companies have pockets deep enough to drill, complete , frac, and set production equipment and then wait to start producing.
There are also rules involved on federal leases that essentially say "produce it or plug it".
A good thing, from my point of view, is the devastation of those economies of countries that rely mostly on oil revenues for their budgets. Specifically those that nationalized the energy industry and confiscated all private wells, fields, equipment, rigs and infrastructure and are incapable of running it efficiently enough to compete. Venezuela comes to mind. They "stole" every asset any private oil company had that was operating in Venezuela at the time. Most were American majors. Venezuela does not have the engineers needed to operate nor explore to keep production climbing, not to mention the technology intensive secondary production methods.
Venezuela has already sent their energy minister to the gulf states to plead their case from fellow Opec members, to which he is being told tough shit.
In my opinion there are a lot of things going wrong in the world at the same time and in the near future you will see a GLOBAL ECONOMIC DEPRESSION that will make 1929 look like a picnic. Goverments are bleeding their people dry with more and more taxes, fees and fines and it will only get worse as the economies turn down more. It's not the fault of the evil one percenters , it's the total incompetence of governments who have no idea how a global economy is interrelated. There will be a total confidence loss in the EU of the EURO, greece will bail out of the EU causing a domino effect on the rest of the EU. Global capital will start leaving Europe ( it's alrady leaving Russia) and will flee to the last safe place, America, driving the dollar higher against all other currencies , causing more defaulting of international loans in dollars due to them trying to be paid back in currencies on a slide compared to the dollar. Look what just happened in Sweden. The Swiss franc was "pegged" to the EURO, last month the Swiss "unpegged" it, it's value immediately rose against the Euro. A lot of mortgages in Europe were made in Swiss Francs, and are going to be tried to be paid back in currencies falling in value compared to the Swiss Franc. The EU was destined to fail because a common currency was not tied to a common debt....
BTW, if you have any investments in bonds, god help you...that's the next bubble to burst....even Germany could not sell it's Gov't bonds in the last auction a week ago. It's gonna get bad folks.
30.00 dollar oil will look good to me before this is over....