News from December 2010

Brazil to build ‘underwater cities’ to drill for oil

Brazil’s state oil company is planning to do away with offshore oil drilling platforms and replace them with automated “underwater cities” that extract oil. In what could prove to be one of the most ambitious industrial projects ever undertaken, Petrobras is drawing up plans to place giant machinery and robots 6,000 feet under the sea [...]

Sharon Astyk: 2011 Predictions A Savage Place

This year I have a jump on my predictions – as part of my comparatively new role as Editor of the Peak Oil Review Commentary section, I had the fun of asking a whole lot of smart people what they think is going to happen, and thinking about their predictions first. If you haven’t seen [...]

Peak Oil, International Trade And Population

Oil is a finite resource! Eventually the oil remaining on the planet will be exhausted and no longer able to be used by humanity. Peak oil can be defined in two ways— The first way is when total amount of oil withdrawn from the earth for use by humanity starts to decline; example— in year [...]

Deutsche Bank: $125 oil spike in 2012

This morning I read the Deutsche Bank report The End of the Oil Age: 2011 and beyond: a reality check. This is by analyst Paul Sankey and coauthors. Overall, the report is a pleasure to read: smart, interesting, broadly researched, well balanced. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in how peak oil is really [...]

Supermarkets – What Price Cheap Food? (2010)

Gone are the days of grazing cattle now we have mega dairies that are rarely witnessed by the public where cows rarely go outside. Journalist David Kirby of New York (author of Animal Factory) describes them as factories rather than farms. Is animal welfare being sacrificed for volume? Panorama manages to gain entrance into a [...]

Saudi Aramco says world has 14trn barrels of crude but are mostly inaccessible

New technology in the future could boost the world’s proven oil resources by nearly two trillion barrels but more than five times of these quantities could remain inaccessible, according to Saudi Aramco Speaking at a seminar in Riyadh, Buraik said the quantity of oil extracted so far worldwide does not exceed one trillion barrels. “Advanced [...]

Is the Peak Oil Debate Really Dead?

Peak oil is back in the news, mostly for its apparent failure. The story starts with a five-year-old wager. In 2005, John Tierney of The New York Times bet $5,000 with peak-oil supporter Matt Simmons (the late energy investment banker and author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World [...]

Largest natural gas reserve discovered in Israel

The reserve, Leviathon, is the largest amount of natural gas discovered in the world in the last decade and is located in approximately 5,400 feet (1,645 meters) of water, about 130 kilometers offshore of Haifa and 29 miles (47 kilometers) southwest of the Tamar discovery. Last year, Israeli company Isramco announced that reserves of natural [...]

Christopher Swann: Oil bulls may have to pull in their horns

Recent years have been humbling for oil bulls. In 2008 Goldman Sachs was arguing that crude would have risen to between $150 and $200 a barrel by now. Since then the notion of peak oil on which many such forecasts were based has taken a battering. Rather than bumping up against the limits of available [...]

India population will overtake China by 2025

Asia is set to become the most populous region in the world by 2025 – and not only this, but India is also on track to overtake China to become the most populous country in the world. The United States will remain the third largest nation, followed by Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria. Analysts [...]