China To North America: Send Us Your Oil

As Americans quarrel over whether fossil fuels belong in their future, Asian countries are taking a powerful message to Washington Thursday: Ship your oil and gas to us. The case for the establishment of a transpacific energy market involving the United States and Canada as exporters, and Asian countries including China, Japan and Korea as […]

Food Prices Still Elevated

It’s been a few months since I checked the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index.  The above shows the latest data (through August).  As you can see, food prices, after rising very sharply in 2010, have stabilized near their recent peak level.  Presumably this has been aided in part by the slowdown in the global […]

Climate change, peak oil – the video game

The global economy is headed toward collapse, revolutions are breaking out across the Middle East, famine is ravaging Africa and the world is approaching a peak oil crisis. No, these are not headlines ripped from the news; these are the challenges facing Windows and Mac gamers in Fate of the World: Tipping Point from Red […]

Richard Heinberg: why end of growth can mean more happiness

Richard Heinberg- whose latest book describes The End of Growth- isn’t looking for when the recession will end and we’ll get back to “normal”. He believes our decades-long era of growth was based on aberrant set of conditions- namely cheap oil, but also cheap minerals, cheap food, etc- and that looking ahead, we need to […]

Deepwater GOM: Reserves versus Production – Part 1: Thunder Horse & Mars-Ursa

The world oil and gas 2P cumulative discoveries can be modelled with 3 cycles [NE: 2P discoveries represent those resources are proven as reserves plus those that probably shall become reserves; more details here]. For crude excluding extra-heavy oil, the first cycle corresponds to surface exploration (1900-1950); the second cycle to seismic exploration starting in 1930 […]

Jeff Rubin: Governments powerless to prevent another recession

The more you hear about the extraordinary efforts that governments around the world are taking to promote economic growth, the less confident you can be in the result. With the clock ticking on a Greek default, members of the European Monetary Union are considering sweetening their bail out pot for a second time since the […]

Alexander Cockburn: Forget peak oil – America has a glut of the black stuff

I’VE NEVER believed in ‘peak oil’, the notion held with religious conviction by many on the left here that world production is topping out and will soon slide, plunging the world into economic chaos. There’s plenty of oil, with the constraints as always being the cost of recovery, as witness the vast new North Dakota […]

Yergin Interview: Forget about peak oil

According to Pulitzer-winner Daniel Yergin, the fossil-fuel tipping point is a myth. He explains what that means Remember summer 2008? OK, maybe you’d rather not. It was a rough time for American drivers. An oil crisis had shot gas prices up to a wincing all-time high of $4.11 per gallon, squeezing our wallets and causing […]

Is a world population of seven billion sustainable?

On the eve of the world’s population reaching 7 billion, leading minds discuss what the future holds for our increasingly crowded planet The world’s population is expected to hit 7 billion in October – growing to seven times the estimated one billion population of the early 1800s. As part of the University of Cambridge’s Festival of […]

Gail Tverberg: Is Yergin Correct about Oil Supply?

On Monday after the WSJ ran Daniel Yergin’s essay, There Will Be Oil, I submitted this rebuttal.  They ask to have the exclusive right to any submission for 10 days. At this point, they have neither printed it nor responded back, so it seems OK for me to post it here instead. Saturday, September 17, […]

The Peak Oil Crisis: Adaptive Technology

Significant technological advances rarely make eye-catching headlines as they come from many small advances involving numerous scientific disciplines. However, every now and again it becomes clear that progress is being made. When President Obama recently proposed raising the mileage for cars to an average of 54.5 miles per gallon, the automobile manufacturers– much to the […]

N. American oil output could top 40-year-old peak

North America appears headed for an oil renaissance, with crude production expected to hit an all-time high by 2016 given the current pace of drilling in the U.S. and Canada, according to a study released by an energy research firm this week. U.S. oil production in areas including West Texas’ Permian Basin, South Texas’ Eagle Ford […]

BP CEO says sees Brent crude prices at $90-$100/barrel

Brent crude oil prices are seen at around $90-$100 a barrel, BP group chief executive Bob Dudley said on Wednesday, without elaborating. On Wednesday, Brent futures LCOc1 lost 78 cents to $106.36 a barrel by 0628 GMT, after falling more than a dollar earlier. U.S. crude CLc1 shed $1.23 to $83.23 a barrel. Oil prices […]

Peak Oil 101

Peak Oil is the point at which we reach a maximum rate in global conventional oil production. As we hit this limit to supply, prices will rise and production will shift to alternatives – but will these alternatives give us enough power to run our world? And at what environmental cost? This “Peak Oil 101” […]

U.S. Military to Spend Big on Alternative Energy

The Riverine Command Boat (Experimental) is powered by a 50/50 algae-based and NATO F-76 fuels blend to support the Navy’s efforts to reduce total energy consumption on naval ships. (U.S. Navy photo) According to a new study: From Barracks to Battlefield: Clean Energy Innovation and America’s Armed Forces [PDF], by Pew Charitable Trusts, the U.S. […]

OPEC won’t interfere with falling oil prices, for now

Oil prices may be $20 off April’s $127-a-barrel peak but there is no panic in Riyadh, Kuwait City or Abu Dhabi. Far from it. Oil policy officials in the capitals of OPEC’s Gulf Arab price doves Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are relaxed and won’t be losing sleep if prices fall further. […]

Drilling Down: Tainter and Patzek tell the energy-complexity story

Joseph Tainter and Tadeusz Patzek are authors of a soon-to-be-released book called Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma. This book is part of Charles Hall’s Briefs in Energy series with the publisher Springer. An earlier book in this series was The Limits to Growth Revisited, by Ugo Bardi. The new book, […]

Still More Never-Ending Efforts To Skate Past The Facts Of Peak Oil (Pt 1)

Back in April, I followed-up on a series of posts which I first began nearly a year ago and last discussed back in April [links below*]. In that series, I’ve discussed the apparently limitless ability of too many to either ignore facts about oil production entirely, or who instead resort to efforts where disingenuous arguments […]

OPEC is Hanging by a Thread

History has a knack for repeating itself. We’ve seen it happen time and again. It feels like an inevitable cycle, and there’s no immediate solution to this problem. It’s happening right now, as a matter of fact. All we need to do is take one look at the OPEC. They’re doomed to the same fate […]

The Quest questioned

World-famous energy historian and analyst Daniel Yergin has a new book out, a sequel to his Pulitzer-winning book The Prize. His new book — The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World — is another tome, and has been hailed as “masterly.” But as I read through it, I found many holes […]

More pipe, more trains: the oil production boom in North America requires it

It merely takes an industry pipeline conference to make demonstrably clear the United States’ reversal of fortune as a hydrocarbon producer. The Platts sixth annual Pipeline Development and Expansion Conference in Houston wrapped up last week, and the two days of presentations revealed a largely uniform message: We’re building pipeline infrastructure as fast and vast […]

Cities use up 75 per cent of the world’s energy

The impact of cities “Cities are 2 per cent of the Earth’s crust but they are 50 per cent of the world’s population,” says Carlo Ratti, the head of MIT’s Senseable City Lab. Cities also consume 75 per cent of the world’s energy, he told CNN.com. Is your job in peril? “If you’re taking a […]

Hess CEO: US In ‘Desperate Need’ Of Energy Policy

Hess Chief Executive John Hess on Tuesday railed against government inaction in forming a comprehensive energy policy, calling on the Obama administration to increase drilling permit approvals in the Gulf of Mexico and warning of an impending energy crisis. The administration, “must set a strategic vision for our country to follow,” Hess told an industry […]

Peak Oil keynote by Randy Udall and sustainability conference call for participants

Local Future invites visionaries, activists, and leaders to apply to The 2011 International Conference on Sustainability, Transition and Culture Change: Vision, Action, Leadership (VAL). Participants include: Dr. Steve Keen received the Revere Award from the Real World Economics Review in 2010 for most cogently warned of the crisis, and whose work is most likely to […]

Peak Oil – Geologists VS Economists

You may have noticed that I don’t refer to Peak Oil but Peak Cheap Oil. Our economy is dependent on cheap oil for transportation.  Eaun Mearns explains that Peak Oil is more about economics than geology but that the economists don’t get it right either. For a number of years there has been an arid […]

IOCs resume crude oil, natural gas production in Libya

Total SA and Eni SPA said they have resumed production of crude oil in Libya, while state-owned Sirte Oil said it has restarted output from its eastern gas fields. “We have started producing and sending gas to the power plants of Benghazi and Zuetina,” said a Sirte Oil spokesman, adding, “Soon we won’t have to […]

Iraq signs deal to buy 18 F-16 warplanes

Iraq has signed a contract to buy 18 Lockheed Martin F-16 warplanes to bolster its air force, an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Monday. The value of the deal was not immediately known, but a senior U.S. military official said recently the offer on the table for the Iraqi government was valued […]

Clean energy: A faded shade of green

At the start of this century, clean energy was all the rage. The revolution may still be happening, but it’s taking its time, reports Peter Huck. For clean technology fans, the dawn of the 21st century appeared to be the best of times. As the world confronted the growing scientific consensus that rising greenhouse gases […]

Who’s afraid of Daniel Yergin?

Daniel Yergin has always huffed and puffed against peak oil. But will his new cornucopian book blow the house down? Photo: World Economic Forum. Maybe you’ve tried arguing with a Fox News fan about global warming? Soon, you could start having the same kind of time-wasting exchanges about peak oil and energy depletion. The good […]

Fukushima Desolation Worst Since Nagasaki

Beyond the police roadblocks that mark the no-go zone around Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, six-foot tall weeds invade rice paddies and vines gone wild strangle road signs along empty streets. Takako Harada, 80, returned to an evacuated area of Iitate village to retrieve her car. Beside her house is an empty cattle pen, the […]

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