News from June 2010

PeakOil.com: Weekly Petroleum Supply Report 6.30.10

PeakOil’s own Pup55 reviews the weekly EIA Petroleum Supply Report and pits his forecasting prowess against the so-called “experts”. The main driver of the decrease in crude oil was imports, like it always is, in this case the Captain Jack theory was incorrect since pricing was good last week, but imports were down to only [...]

The Energy Transition Is Already Underway

Lately I’ve been struck by the number of new groups and proposals calling for America to begin the transition to cleaner energy. We even heard this call from the Oval Office several weeks ago. Yet while there’s clearly much more to be done to wean ourselves from our reliance on oil and other high-carbon fuels, I’m baffled [...]

Colin Campbell on Peak Oil

Colin Campbell demonstrates peak oil using an irish pub table and several stouts!

Cantarell Finally Slips Below 500 kbpd

t’s odd that people believe something truly new is possible in the world of global oil discovery. Oil deposits on earth follow a fairly well defined pattern: a handful of giant fields, and a great number of smaller fields. Unsurprisingly, 150 years of oil exploration and discovery has done nothing to upend this distribution. The giant fields were all found earlier in the oil age. Now we are into the latter part of the oil age, when the large fields have peaked and gone into decline, and we spend more capital, more labor, and more energy to extract oil from the smaller fields.

Shell: deep-water oil drilling will go on

“Given the rise in the population and the rise in the developing world of energy needs, we will have to develop those resources in deep waters, so my expectation is that we will go forward with it, but it will need some changes,” Voser told the Fortune Global Forum in Cape Town.

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NYT: Is a New Reactor Rust-Prone?

Courtesy of Arnold Gundersen, Fairewinds Associates An expert warns that an air pathway in a new reactor design could open the way for the release of radioactive materials.Approval of the design for the Westinghouse AP 1000 reactor is slowly moving forward at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as are financial arrangements for building the nation’s first [...]

The EU’s Solar Science Fiction

Solar energy in Europe remains, by far, the most expensive energy source and it will be years before it can compete, even with other renewable sources. Germany, Italy, and especially Spain, once shining examples for the solar industry, have backtracked on their initial embraces of solar and are now cutting subsidies. Indeed, earlier this year, [...]

Natural Gas as Panacea: Dubious Path to a Green Future

Many energy experts contend natural gas is the ideal fuel as the world makes the transition to renewable energy. But since much of that gas will come from underground shale, potentially at high environmental cost, it would be far better to skip the natural gas phase and move straight to massive deployment of solar and wind power.

Can we feed our world without Monsanto?

Every minute of every day, our global family welcomes 255 babies into the world. That’s 134 million new mouths to feed every year, for a total population increase of 2.2 billion in the next thirty years. Hugh Grant, the CEO of agricultural giant Monsanto, often cites the world’s booming population as the core reason global [...]

Kunstler : Say What?

Wall Street – in particular the biggest “banks” – packaged up and sold enough swindles to unwind 2500 years of western civilization. You simply cannot imagine the amount of bad financial paper out there right now in every vault and portfolio on the planet. Enough, really, to sink any company even pretending to trade in [...]