News from June 2011

Making sense of peak oil and energy uncertainty

There are currently no viable substitutes for oil at current rates of consumption. Although alternatives to oil do exist for many of its uses, they are generally vastly inferior to oil in their energy content and in the ease of which they can be extracted, transported, and turned into a commercially-useable fuel. For over 65 [...]

Fracking Culture

“We are right at that spaghetti junction where all the lines converge with population and resources, food supply, energy, water and the rest. We’re at that point right now, in exactly the decade The Club of Rome predicted we would arrive here. We have to somehow get through this collapsing passageway and into the next [...]

Feeling Peaky?

Earlier this month, we had Tony Greenham of The New Economics Foundation visit Henderson to talk about “peak oil” and the implications for future economic growth. Over 40 fund managers from across Henderson’s equities and bond teams turned up to hear what Tony had to say, demonstrating that investors from a wide range of perspectives [...]

IEA eyes oil release ‘extension’

The move would be in defiance of Opec’s criticism of the IEA’s decision last week to release 60 million barrels over an initial 30-day period to fill the gap in supplies left by the disruption to Libya’s output. Richard Jones, deputy executive director of the 28-member agency, said he believed the release would be temporary [...]

Shell President Odum optimistic on chances for 2012 Arctic offshore drilling

Shell Oil President Marvin Odum has faith that his company can develop vast reserves in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northwest coast. But he’d like to get on with exploratory drilling to tap into a resource that could be crucial to meeting the country’s energy needs. “That’s an area where working in Alaska has, frankly, [...]

Peak Oil Investments

nfortunately, U.S. sentiment toward domestic oil production is a case of foggy optimism. Look at the facts: U.S. production peaked at just slightly over 10 million barrels per day in November 1970. Domestic production that year averaged approximately 9.6 million barrels per day. That’s it. There’s no getting around it. To think we’ll ever return [...]

Fukushima spews, Los Alamos burns, Vermont rages and we’ve almost lost Nebraska

Humankind is now threatened by the simultaneous implosion, explosion, incineration, courtroom contempt and drowning of its most lethal industry. The nuclear one. We know only two things for certain: worse nuclear disasters are yet to come, and those in charge are lying about it—at least to the extent of sharing what they actually know, which [...]

A reality check on nuclear fusion at MIT

-Nuclear fusion suffers from an image of being too good to be true. But researchers here say they are already doing nuclear fusion on a small scale and it’s just a matter of time–decades, realistically–before it becomes practical. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology houses an active research lab for nuclear fusion, which many consider the [...]

Central Petroleum plans to tap world’s biggest coal field

An Australian company says a coal field discovered in the Simpson Desert could be the biggest in the world. Central Petroleum Limited says it recently discovered the field in the south-east of the Northern Territory, about 300 kilometres from Alice Springs. It says the coal seam stretches across 400 kilometres. The company has signed an [...]

How can a government fix its debt problem?

We have all read about the standard “fixes” for a governmental debt problem–(1) inflate your way out of the problem, (2) cut programs and/or raise taxes, and (3) restructure debt, perhaps delaying repayment and giving bondholders a “haircut” on promised payouts. A fourth one seems to circulate through peak oil circles, namely “debt jubilee”. It [...]