Peak Oil News and Message Boards

"One day we will run out of oil, it is not today or tomorrow, but one day we will run out of oil and we have to leave oil before oil leaves us, and we have to prepare ourselves for that day," Dr Birol said. "The earlier we start, the better, because all of our economic and social system is based on oil, so to change from that will take a lot of time and a lot of money and we should take this issue very seriously," he said.

...

The IEA estimates that the decline in oil production in existing fields is now running at 6.7 per cent a year compared to the 3.7 per cent decline it had estimated in 2007, which it now acknowledges to be wrong.

"If we see a tightness of the markets, people in the street will see it in terms of higher prices, much higher than we see now. It will have an impact on the economy, definitely, especially if we see this tightness in the markets in the next few years," Dr Birol said.

"It will be especially important because the global economy will still be very fragile, very vulnerable. Many people think there will be a recovery in a few years' time but it will be a slow recovery and a fragile recovery and we will have the risk that the recovery will be strangled with higher oil prices," he told The Independent.

The chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA) has urged the world to slash hundreds of billions of dollars of fossil fuel subsidies or face the prospect of a catastrophic 3.5 degrees Centigrade rise in global temperatures.
“Today $409 billion equivalent of fossil fuels subsidies are in place which encourage developing countries - where the bulk of the energy demand and CO2 emissions come from – [towards a] wasteful use of energy,” Fatih Birol told EurActiv in an exclusive interview.

The sum represents a $110 billion increase on the 2009 level.

According to Birol, cutting such subsidies in major non-OECD countries is “the one single policy item” which could help reorient the world towards a trajectory of 2 degrees global warming.

It would also reduce CO2 emissions and help renewable energies such as solar and wind power to get a bigger market share, according to the IEA's World Energy Outlook 2011 report which will be released on 9 November.

Analysis in the report “indicates that the door for a 2 degrees trajectory may be closing if we do not act urgently and boldly,” Birol said.

Plantagenet wrote:Its already too late to leave oil before it leaves us. Oil has already peaked and we are on the production plateau.
Soon the global oil supply will start decreasing each year. All we can do now is try to leave oil simultaneously with oil leaving us.

...
What the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which is the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, used to call "total oil production" has now morphed into so-called "total liquids production." It's a tacit admission that conventional oil supplies cannot meet all our needs. But even total liquids production--which includes ethanol, biodiesel and natural gas liquids--has moved up only a paltry 2.6 percent during the entire period from the end of 2005 to today. Hence, the continuing high prices for liquid fuels.

Now, it's not as if high prices haven't sent people looking for more oil and working on more substitutes. The problem is that all of this activity is facing a considerable headwind. It's called depletion. And, as they say in the oil patch, depletion never sleeps. It's going on in every operating well in every country around the clock, 365 days a year. Estimates suggest that the decline in current production capacity might be around 4 percent per year. That means that 4 percent of the current production capacity for oil must be replaced each year just to break even. And, of course, to grow supplies, new production capacity must exceed this amount. But it hasn't, and oil substitutes haven't really grown by any significant amount in the last six years either.

The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for ever", according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.

Anything built from now on that produces carbon will do so for decades, and this "lock-in" effect will be the single factor most likely to produce irreversible climate change, the world's foremost authority on energy economics has found. If this is not rapidly changed within the next five years, the results are likely to be disastrous.

"The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried – if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."

The share of fossil fuels in global primary energy consumption falls from around 81 percent today to 75 percent in 2035, while renewables increase from 13 percent of the mix today to 18 percent.

This scenario already assumes a huge boost in subsidies for renewables, from $64 billion today to $250 billion in 2035.

"One wonders how many more worrying figures the world needs," commented Connie Hedegaard, the European Union's climate commissioner.

The report "shows that the world is heading for a fossil-fuel lock-in. This is another urgent call to move to a low-carbon economy," she said in a statement.

Setting a global price on carbon, slashing fossil fuel subsidies, boosting renewable energy and energy efficiency and revised tax codes are all tools for achieving that end, she added.

all world economies are on the edge of recession

time is to check your Lithium

The International Energy Agency (IEA), traditionally a very fossil-fuel-friendly international agency, reported today that renewable energy is becoming cost-competitive (and should receive subsidies to account for its environmental, energy security, and health benefits).

While I’m happy to see the IEA make this announcement (and there are tons of great points made in the report that I highlight below), I can’t help but point out a couple things….

If you look at the full costs of each energy source (that means adding in health costs, energy security costs, and environmental costs) solar, wind, and geothermal are already equal to or cheaper than fossil fuels. What’s the difference between a dollar you spend at the hospital and a dollar you spend on your electricity? Nothing much, except who’s receiving that dollar and what you are going through (i.e. what health predicament you have or don’t have). IEA gets this, but could have done a better job of spelling that out.

Additionally, not even taking those factors into account, if you look at the rising costs of coal and nuclear, the falling costs of solar, and the time it takes to put up a coal or nuclear power plant, solar is already cheaper by many insider estimates.

A new report released Thursday by the International Energy Agency says solar could provide a third of global energy by 2060. But there’s a giant ‘if’ attached to that rosy projection: The world’s lawmakers must adopt a broad range of policies that include incentives for early deployment, subsidizing research and development and removing non-economic barriers such as grid access and permitting.

Most importantly, countries should move away from subsidizing certain solar technologies and instead establish a carbon price, a strategy that will encourage a broader view of the energy transition, Paolo Frankl, the agency’s head of renewable energy told Bloomberg.

The IEA report builds off other analyses that have come before it and aims to provide an updated picture of solar technology trends and markets. According to the report, solar energy will be the available and make the most sense in warm and sunny countries — which is a rather obvious insight. But the population growth figures the IEA included drives home the point.

Sunnier countries, those zones around the equator, will house about 7 billion people or 80 percent of the world’s population by 2050 versus 2 billion folks who will live in cold and temperate countries that includes most of Europe, Russia and parts of China and the United States.

High oil prices threaten to worsen a global economic slowdown and crude producers should consider boosting output, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency said Wednesday.

"The current high oil prices have the potential to strangle the economic recovery in many countries," Fatih Birol said in a speech Wednesday in Singapore. "I hope that high oil prices don't slow down Chinese economic growth and the negative effect that would have on the global recovery."

Crude has jumped to $100 a barrel from $75 in October amid signs the U.S. economy will likely avoid a recession. Most economists expect global economic growth to slow next year as Europe's debt crisis threatens to drag the continent into recession.

Birol suggested crude producers should boost output amid growing demand in developing countries and falling inventories in wealthy nations.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is meeting later Wednesday in Vienna to decide whether to change the cartel's output quotas.

meemoe_uk wrote:Another year, another fail for the 'peakoil is now' gang.

But, this doesn't mean anything to a peaker.
Don't wobble in your beliefs about panic and hype about an imminent oil shortage crisis.
Let JD explain
Now you can have all the fun of hype and scare you had last year ( and year before that, and the decades before that..etc) all over again.

Because now.....
PEAK OIL WAS IN 2010!!!!
And this isn't like all the other times we think peak has happened. This time we really know for sure. There is absolutely no way conventional supply can top 2010. And this is time, it's not like dozens of other years that there's been absolutely no way that supply can go up. Oh no, THIS...IS...IT!!!