US poised to become world’s leading liquid petroleum producer

The US is overtaking Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest producer of liquid petroleum, in a sign of how its booming oil production has reshaped the energy sector. US production of oil and related liquids such as ethane and propane was neck-and-neck with Saudi Arabia in June and again in August at about 11.5m barrels […]

ISIS Reportedly Moving In On Baghdad

ISIS is reportedly closing in on Baghdad. This is the claim being made by the vicar of Iraq’s only Anglican Church. According to him, the Islamic militant group is only about one mile away from the Iraqi capital. Airstrikes against ISIS targets were supposed to stop the group from taking Baghdad. But, the advance by […]

The Collapse of the American Economy Has Begun

Susan Duclos recently interviewed “V” the Guerrilla Economist and the following information was revealed in this landmark interview: “The process of undermining the US dollar is well on schedule as well; more than 105 countries have decided that the dollar no longer works for them, joining Russia, China and other BRICS nations in leaving the […]

Europe & China Start Direct Trading In Euros & Yuan As De-Dollarization Expands

De-dollarization has been an ongoing theme hidden just below the surface of the mainstream media for more than a year as Russia and China slowly but surely attempt to “isolate” the US Dollar. Until very recently, direct trade agreements with China (in other words, bypassing the US Dollar exchange in bilateral trade) had been with […]

Peak Oil: The Mirage Pt 3

This is a third look at one of this year’s better features on the subject of peak oil: an article by John Kaufmann entitled: The Energy Independence Illusion. It’s an excellent read [adapted from a presentation to the World Affairs Council of Oregon this past March] for anyone interested in this topic. [Any quotes here […]

Coal competing with oil and gas for space on rail

In 2010, Chuck West, manager of coal procurement for one of the country’s largest power generators, American Electric Power, rode a train down from the coal fields of Wyoming to Denver. Out the window, he took note of the many empty coal cars parked along the tracks. Coal shipments have been on the decline since […]

Sustaining oil boom a logical step

One of the economy’s good-news stories is the oil boom, a derivative of the natural gas boom. When the drilling techniques used to tap vast new reservoirs of natural gas were applied to oil, they yielded similarly astounding results. Since 2008, U.S. oil production has increased from 5 million barrels a day (mbd) to 8.3 […]

Searching for the Good Life in the Bakken Oil Fields

I rode into the Bakken in a dusty car with Minnesota plates and “Highway to Hell” blasting on the radio, looking for a job where they wouldn’t ask too many questions. The oil boom had drawn thousands of capitalists, laborers, and fortune-seekers—more than a few outlaws, too—who had arrived with much the same purpose over […]

The Oil Head-Fake: The Illusion that Lower Oil Prices Are Positive

The essence of the Oil Head-Fake Dynamic is the inevitable drop in oil price due to global recession will trigger disruption of the global oil supply chain. I’ve described the dynamic of structural imbalances of supply and demand leading to lower prices for crude oil as the Oil Head-Fake: high global production (supply) continues while demand […]

Plowing Bedrock: How bad is soil erosion in US cropland?

A statement1 in JM Greer’s blog last month challenged everything I thought I knew about soil management in American cropland. At today’s rate of erosion, he wrote, the topsoil would be gone by 2075. Gone! The land might look like Providence Canyon7, where poor soil management in the 1820’s triggered runaway erosion that is still […]

How Far Will the Shale Boom Go?

The shale energy revolution has already upset the “peak oil” forecast, which predicted that the world will soon reach the point of highest physical oil output and thereafter global production will begin an inexorable decline. Now, in the context of the worsening political situation in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, its impact is being […]

“No Ordinary Conference”: The Fourth Degrowth Conference in Leipzig

The following notes are intended to give some personal insights into what was a very special event, the fourth in a series, (Paris 2008, Barcelona 2010,Venice 2012) and, while it followed the process of previous degrowth conferences, it was by far the most adventurous to be attempted to date. The event was marked by a […]

A Spaceship called Eschatology

This article appeared on “Virgin.com” on Aug 12, 2014. Image from NASA “Eschatology” is a Greek word meaning “the science of the end.” In ancient times, it used to be popular with theologians, but today it seems to have picked up interest to describe various kinds of catastrophes which could happen in the future. Things […]

Blistering Drought Leaves the Poorest High and Dry

The last time there was mud on his village roads was about a year ago, says Murugesu Mohanabavan, a farmer from the village of Karachchi, situated about 300 km north of Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo. “Since last October we have had nothing but sun, all day,” the 40-year-old father of two school-aged children told IPS. […]

Paul Craig Roberts: Washington’s Secret Agendas

One might think that by now even Americans would have caught on to the constant stream of false alarms that Washington sounds in order to deceive the people into supporting its hidden agendas. The public fell for the lie that the Taliban in Afghanistan are terrorists allied with al Qaeda. Americans fought a war for […]

Honolulu: Peak Oil canary in the coalmine

Kakaako: The beginning of the End for Honolulu’s character as it becomes YuppieLand .. http://www.gofundme.com/eevcfw

Peak Oil and Climate Change: A Rural Community Guide

Global climate change is a reality, and at the same time energy prices continue to rise. As these trends will fundamentally change our communities, how can municipalities work to increase resilience – to ensure that communities can withstand potential shocks and changes? What types of responses address both climate change and rising energy prices? This […]

Ready Or Not… The Unsustainable Status Quo Is Ending

~ Walking straight in a hall of mirrors I have to confess, it’s getting more and more difficult to find ways of writing about everything going on in the world. Not because there’s a shortage of things to write about — wars, propaganda, fraud, Ebola — but because most of the negative news and major […]

Australian Government tries to hide its own peak oil report

I find myself somewhat surprised some local peak oil activists managed to get the odious Piers Akerman at the awful Daily Telegraph to print this story, but I guess stranger things have happened – TOD ANZ points to the story – Australian Government tries to hide its own peak oil report. The Daily Telegraph has […]

Why Peak-Oil Predictions Haven’t Come True

Have we beaten “peak oil”? For decades, it has been a doomsday scenario looming large in the popular imagination: The world’s oil production tops out and then starts an inexorable decline—sending costs soaring and forcing nations to lay down strict rationing programs and battle for shrinking reserves. U.S. oil production did peak in the 1970s […]

Israel’s natural gas bonanza is an illusion

The national consensus holds that the discoveries of huge offshore natural gas fields in recent years amount to an economic revolution, one that will put the economy on easy street for generations to come. A leading British energy expert, however, says it’s an illusion. “Exporting gas as LNG [liquefied natural gas] is very expensive. Israeli […]

Solar Market Potential in Saudi Arabia

When 13 MW of renewable capacity is installed in the United States, understandably, no one bats an eyelash. When 13 MW of renewable capacity is installed in the Gulf, there’s a multimillion-dollar inauguration party, in true Gulf opulence. At the end of October 2013, the UAE celebrated the inauguration of its second utility scale power […]

To Become Oil Barons, ISIS Has Sold To Neighbors And Enemies

Existing black-market structures have helped the Islamic State convert oil into cash – and their customers have included their ardent foes across borders in Turkey and Southern Iraq. NPR

Crash Course – Chapter 15 – Demographics

Age distribution is too lopsided to support entitlements When Americas social security and health care and entitlement systems were first conceived, the country has much different age distribution. There were roughly 7 active workers per retiree, and the ability to transfer some of that employee wealth to support older citizens was supportable. But with the […]

Kenya: The Next Big Oil Exporter

Not even the specter of a spillover of Islamic extremism from Somalia can dampen the atmosphere in Kenya, where commercial oil production is expected to begin in 2016 and discovery after discovery has made this the hottest and fastest-paced hydrocarbon scene on the continent. When it comes to new oil and gas frontiers, today it’s […]

The Return To $30 a Barrel Oil

While the world starts to understand that behind the evil behind ISIS there is also another element to it, greed. US airstrikes hit mobile oil refineries in Syria that was help fund the terrorist group. Ideology is always best suited when it is being funded with oil and to strike at these mobile units is […]

Family spending on gasoline hits all-time high

The average U.S. household spent more than $2,600 on gas last year for a third consecutive year — an all-time high and a 111% increase compared with the amount spend a decade earlier, an advocacy group says. The increase was due to the high price of oil, says the group, Securing America’s Future Energy, which […]

Long And Wrong In The Oil Market

Is Andy Hall on to something? The legendary oil trader is reportedly telling his investors that America’s shale energy boom will be coming to a swift end, sending oil prices skyward to $150 a barrel over the next five years. Such bold predictions helped Hall amass a small fortune; he was once awarded a $100 million bonus for his oil trading […]

Rouhani: Courage needed to clinch nuclear deal

Iran President Hassan Rouhani said Friday “courageous decisions” must be made to clinch a long-term nuclear agreement and that any deal without the lifting of all sanctions against Tehran was “unacceptable.” Speaking to reporters in New York on the sidelines of the annual U.N. General Assembly, he added that progress in the latest round of […]

ExxonMobil finds oil in the Russian Arctic

ExxonMobil and its Russian partner reportedly have found oil in an Arctic well where drilling was to have stopped today but for a US extension granted to prevent a possible environmental accident The oil was found at Universitetskaya, a 7,700-foot well in the Kara Sea that ExxonMobil’s partner, Rosneft, believes holds about 9 billion barrels of oil. The find […]

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LATEST NEWS HEADLINES

• Is It Time To Abandon the Idea of Phasing Out Oil and Gas?
• More than 20% of global refining capacity at risk of closure
• Charles Hugh Smith Blog: Fire, Then Ice Our Deflationary Future
• Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser says energy transition strategy ‘visibly failing’
• 100 million-degree ‘artificial sun’ sets new records in hunt for energy’s ‘Holy Grail’

• China’s peak oil demand bombshell eviscerates Danielle Smith’s energy strategy
• US seeks to buy up to 3 million bbls of oil for Strategic Petroleum Reserve
• Desertification: the world is losing healthy land at an astonishing rate
• US oil production will keep booming in 2024, setting up a possible showdown with Saudi Arabia
• Saudi Arabia piles pressure on UAE to shift COP28 focus away from oil and gas
• US Warship, Commercial Ships Under Attack In Red Sea