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a community peak oil portal
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 Don’t worry about oil. With oil and gas prices at all time highs, that seems a strange thing to say. Yet, we really shouldn’t worry. Solutions are available and well under way.
Around 1880, visionaries in Paris painted a bleak picture of the future. If our city continues to grow at this rate, they argued, carriages couldn’t ride our avenues anymore in the near future. They will be stuck in mounts of horseshit. The respected elders of their times didn’t see that the solution to the problem was already coming. Henry Ford was about to introduce the automobile to the world.
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| Herman Daly on the Credit Crisis, Financial Assets, and Real Wealth |
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 profgoose writes: Previously, Herman Daly wrote a guest post on the Steady State Economy, outlining core suggestions on how to overhaul our banking, financial (and value) systems. I encourage everyone to read it (if short on time, please read the conclusion). Professor Daly was Senior Economist at the World Bank before leaving to teach Ecological Economics at University of Maryland's School for Public Policy. He was also the catalyst for me to leave my own financial career and return to school to study the real economy (i.e. what we call the human economy is only a small part of a larger closed system). Below the fold are his thoughts on the current crisis (current being defined as last 30-40 years or so). (For comparison, here are links to what 'mainstream' economic icons George Soros, and Bill Gross are saying.)
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| The Other Scarce Resource |
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 vox_mundi writes: CHEAP AND PLENTIFUL, water was for centuries a manufacturing tool that industry took for granted. But population growth, globalization, and climate change are shepherding in a new water-constrained era. Good, clean water just cannot be replaced—and it is getting harder to come by.
Manufacturers have been keeping a keen eye on rising energy prices; their concerns about water, in contrast, are turning more and more to the risk of running out. "Everyone shares this water model where it's cheap, cheap, cheap—then unavailable," says Scott Noesen, director of sustainability and business integration at Dow Water Solutions. For Dow, water has become a major strategic issue. "It's huge because we're trying to grow around the world, and where we want to grow often has issues of fresh water," Noesen says.
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| Gazprom Expects OPEC to Stop `Substantial' Drop in Oil Price |
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| (Bloomberg) -- OAO Gazprom, Russia's largest energy company, expects OPEC members to prevent a further ``substantial'' drop in the oil price after it tumbled almost 40 percent since a July high, Deputy Chief Executive Officer Alexander Medvedev said.
``The oil price can't drop down substantially, at least through the policies of OPEC countries,'' Medvedev said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Moscow today. ``We do hope the measures taken both in Europe and the U.S. will not allow the economy to freeze.''
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 What we're facing could be a lot worse than a recession
... Now, as a financial tsunami spreads through Europe, threatening to bring down our global financial system, while yesterday the hard-hit TSX suffered its biggest intra-day point loss ever with $225 billion wiped from share values since last week -- these gurus have changed their tune.
It's not recession we need to fear, it's something far worse.
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| Nigerian conflict a warning for Big Oil in Iraq |
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 BAGHDAD - Recurrent violence in oil-rich parts of Nigeria may provide a sobering lesson for oil companies hoping to work in Iraq — a place that is much more dangerous despite the fact that attacks are at their lowest level in more than four years.
Representatives of 35 international oil companies will meet with Iraqi government officials in London on Monday to discuss the bidding process for eight enormous oil and gas fields. If the contracts are approved, they could lead to the biggest foreign stake in Iraq since the industry was nationalized more than 30 years ago.
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| A cleaner way to get drinking water from seas? |
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David Kreamer's vision is to return old ships to the seas where they belong. But he'd like to see them fulfill a new purpose: turning seawater into drinking water through desalination facilities installed aboard.
According to Kreamer, a geoscientist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, hundreds of mothballed military and private ships could be well adapted as mobile desalination plants.
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| Secret for efficient ethanol in cows' stomachs? |
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 NEW YORK - Researchers attempting to make the production of corn-based ethanol more efficient may not have needed to leave the farm.
During photosynthesis, corn stores nearly half of its potential energy in places other than the corn kernel, such as stalks and leaves.
An enzyme found in a cow's stomach may hold the key to using all of the plant, rather than just the kernel.
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| Inflationary U.S. bailout may boost oil: Merrill |
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LONDON (Reuters) - The inflationary effects of the U.S. government's finance sector bailout could drive oil back above $150 a barrel in the long term, a Merrill Lynch commodities specialist said on Tuesday.
"Near term, the oil price could drop due to the negative effects on the global economy of the ongoing credit contraction," Francisco Blanch, Merrill Lynch's global head, commodities research, told a commodities conference.
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| Asia's Oil Production Expected to Increase, Ease Stress on Global Supplies |
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After years of putting a strain on world energy supplies, Asia is expected to significantly increase its own oil production next year, a development that could add to downward pressure on prices.
China, India and other big energy users in Asia aren't about to become major oil exporters -- far from it. They still consume much more crude than they produce and that trend won't change.
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| Heavy oil flows from cold Ugnu in test, BP says |
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 SUCCESS: BP official pleased but says more work needs to done.
BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc. achieved success in an initial test for production of heavy oil from the Ugnu formation on the North Slope, according to a company spokesman.
The test well succeeded in bringing sand and oil to the surface with a peak rate of about 120 barrels per day. By the end of the test Sept. 15, about 700 barrels of the oil with a consistency similar to chocolate syrup had been mixed with conventional crude produced at the Milne Point field and shipped down the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, BP's Steve Rinehart said.
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| Biofuels: More heat than light? |
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The term 'Biofuels' might sound like a catchy green buzzword, but these alternatives to petroleum-based staples have been around for a long time. The original Ford Model T was configured to run on ethanol rather than gasoline, and Rudolf Diesel ran his first demo-engine on peanut oil.
Biofuels were revived temporarily at least - in the US, by the 1970s oil embargo imposed by OPEC - with shortages and high prices contributing to western economic stagnation. Alternative energy sources were looked at, but economic revival and lower oil prices from the 1980s onward put these revived non-petroleum fuel sources on the back burner.
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| Food for Thought: How Green Are Biofuels? |
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“This is the first age that’s ever paid much attention to the future, which is little ironic since we may not have one”. -- Arthur C. Clarke
On the eve of World War I, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill made a historic decision to shift the power source of the British Navy’s ships from coal to oil. Since Churchill’s decision, energy security has repeatedly emerged as an issue of great importance and it is so once again today. Since Churchill’s day, the key energy security has been diversification. This remains true even today but a wider approach is now required that takes into account the rapid evolution of the global energy trade, supply chain vulnerabilities, terrorism and the integration of major new economies into the world market.
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| London Times: Worst-case scenario is approaching rapidly |
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| Keith_McClary writes: The Bank of England and the Treasury are also considering a range of other measures to shore up the banking system, including the injection of taxpayers’ money into leading banks and a US-style purchase of banks’ “toxic” mortgage-related investments.
These were viewed as worst-case contingency plans. After this weekend, the worst case appears to be approaching rapidly.
The Times
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Posted by coyote on Tuesday, October 07 @ 02:11:07 PDT (116 reads)
(comments? | Score: 0) |
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1. Prices and the bailout
2. Gasoline shortages
3.China
4. India
5. Trouble in Detroit
6. Briefs
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