Mexican drug cartels cripple Pemex operations in basin

LA Times The kidnappings of five petroleum company workers along with 30 others have terrorized the oil community, paralyzing segments of the business. Months later, families have still heard nothing. Reporting from Reynosa, Mexico — The meandering network of pipes, wells and tankers belonging to the gigantic state oil company Pemex have long been an easy target of crooks and drug traffickers who siphon off natural gas, gasoline and even crude, robbing the Mexican treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Now the cartels have taken sabotage to a new level: They've hobbled key operations in parts of the Burgos Basin, home toMexico's biggest natural gas fields. Forced to defer production and curtail drilling and maintenance in a region that spreads through some of Mexico's most dangerous badlands, the world's seventh-largest oil producer has become another casualty of the drug war. More LA Times

Coal and Oil: The Dark Monarchs of Global Energy

The formation of modern society has been dominated by coal and oil, and together these two fossil fuels account for nearly two thirds of all primary energy used by mankind. This makes future production a key question for future social development and this thesis attempts to answer whether it is possible to rely on an assumption of ever increasing production of coal and oil. Both coal and oil are finite resources, created over long time scales by geological processes. It is thus impossible to extract more fossil fuels than geologically available. In other words, there are limits to growth imposed by nature. The concept of depletion and exhaustion of recoverable resources is a fundamental question for the future extraction of coal and oil. Historical experience shows that peaking is a well established phenomenon in production of various natural resources. Coal and ...

Coal and Oil: The Dark Monarchs of Global Energy

The secretary of ASPO International Mikael Höök has now made his thesis public by using a nail and hammer and this ”nailing” is an old tradition at Uppsala University, Sweden. The thesis "Coal and Oil: The Dark Monarchs of Global Energy: Understanding Supply and Extraction Patterns and their Importance for Future Production” can be downloaded from Uppsala University (go to download). You can read the articles in the thesis by downloading the “Athors version“ of the listed publications. The public defense of the thesis will be on September 24th at 9 AM at Ångström Laboratory, Uppsala. This is the third thesis about Peak Oil related subjects from Uppsala Global Energy Systems. Abstract: The formation of modern society has been dominated by coal and oil, and together these two fossil fuels account for nearly two thirds ...

Reconstructing Climate Change

Through the whole year of 2009, building up to the failed Copehagen "climate summit", climate change was heavily promoted by a small but powerful group of OECD political leaders and their corporate, press and media elites as a major challenge to the planet and to our way of life. It was also the big signal for selling Low Carbon energy: from nuclear power and windfarms to landfill methane gas recovery or electric cars. Anything not needing oil or seeming not to was a great big emerging and breaking business opportunity. By midyear 2010 the climate change and green energy transition to "a new ecological society" theme had imploded and fallen off the teleprompters of the few political leaders wha had taken this theme as serious and had invested political ...

Unconventional gas resources changing more than markets

The market changes become more obvious every day. Resource potential is a diminishing concern. The main driver of supply is drilling economics. Only a few years ago, the dominant assumptions were that operators had to drill feverishly just to hold production steady and that LNG imports had to expand to meet whatever demand growth occurred. Now, the main drilling pressures on any given producer are lease obligations and production expectations of investors. With North American gas prices well below energy-equivalent oil values and likely to stay there, LNG once expected to stream into the US is instead competing for sales elsewhere, globalizing the price weakness. Unconventional-gas producers now must focus on "low-cost operational excellence," says a new report from the Deloitte Center for Energy Solutions. That focus becomes transformative. The ...