Turkey Makes Huge 1-Billion-Barrel Oil Discovery

Turkish Petroleum (TPAO) has made the largest crude oil discovery onshore Turkey with a find estimated to hold 1 billion barrels of crude, the Turkish company said. The discovery was made in the southeastern province of Sirnak, which borders the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region in Iraq and Syria. Turkish Petroleum has drilled an exploration well and […]

The Supply of Lithium is Far from Guaranteed

Your kidding? It takes that much water to mine lithium! Lithium is a lynchpin of our current clean energy strategy. It impacts everything from electric vehicles to battery storage for solar and wind. The only problem is the supplies of lithium aren’t in the most advantageous places and getting it out of the ground is […]

Peak Oil – The Hedonic Adjustment

Arthur Berman: “Peak Oil – The Hedonic Adjustment” Episode 54 January 18, 2023 (Conversation recorded on January 2nd, 2022) Show Summary On this episode, petroleum geologist Arthur Berman returns to unpack the development and drawbacks of ‘peak oil’. Art explains how our institutions have redefined what is considered oil, which has created an illusion of […]

Qatar peak oil and gas (update Aug 2022 data)

This is an update to a post of December 2018 Fig 1: Qatar crude & condensate, NGPLs and other liquids Data are from the Energy Information Administration (starting in 1993) https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/petroleum-and-other-liquids/annual-petroleum-and-other-liquids-production Fig 2: Qatar annual oil production, consumption from various sources The 2 crude peaks represent 2 production cycles as can also be seen when […]

Remember Peak Oil? It Never Went Away

Remember peak oil? We recently wrote that it’s back but according to one of the original “peak oilers,” Richard Heinberg, author of the 2005 Peak Oiler classic “The Party’s Over, Peak Oil Is Back,” it never really went away. According to the analysis done in the ’50s by geophysicist King Hubbert, peak oil was supposed to be […]

Energy Problems: Yes, Still There

Back in June 2021, I wrote a longform piece on the energy sector called, “The Case for a Longer-term Oil and Gas Bull Market“. I followed this up with a shorter piece in July 2022 called “Energy: The Area Under the Curve“, which emphasized that it was the integral of energy prices (i.e. the time […]

Peak oil has finally arrived: No, really

I’ve rarely felt more trepidation about writing a column than this one. But here goes: After more than a century of almost continual growth, the world’s appetite for oil is peaking, and will soon enter terminal decline. That’s hard to write, because those who’ve called a top in oil have a forecasting record on a par with […]

Approaching peak phosphorus

Any long-term solution to the projected decline in phosphate supply must involve improving phosphorus use efficiency in crop plants. In times of rising food prices and global food insecurity it is important to remember the basic needs for productive and efficient agriculture. One of these needs is the use of fertilizer. While much research focuses […]

No, not Peak Oil again?

How Patterns of Peak, Plateau, and Decline Point to Fossil Fuels’ Accelerating End By  Kingsmill Bond,  Sam Butler-Sloss The Peaking Series – 1. Theory The Peaking Series is a new series mapping the vast mountain range of past and current peaks in fossil fuel demand. In country after country, sector after sector, fossil fuel demand […]

Billion Barrel Oil Find

Canadian Overseas Petroleum Limited (COPL) has revealed that it has received an independent resource report confirming its deep oil discovery on its affiliate COPL America Inc’s lands in Converse and Natrona counties in Wyoming. According to COPL, which outlined that the report included conservative estimates complying with Canadian standards, the study confirms that the find […]

How Fossil Fuels Made the Human Race Dependent on a Finite Resource

Carey King of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin discusses how the last 70 years of economic and population growth have been fueled by the transition to petroleum, how a decreasing supply of it has increased political polarization, and what the future might hold as supplies continue to dwindle. Carey’s book, The […]

Is the world heading towards Peak Oil?

Let’s park up all the environmental downsides of oil usage for the moment. Because despite all of oil’s sins, most of humanity depends on it for everything from the clothes we wear to the means we employ to get about. Even a lot of the food we eat and many of the modern medicines that […]

Peak Oil Might Be Just Three Years Away

The energy transition continues to gain steam, with oil demand projected to peak in this decade – perhaps as soon as 2025, according to new research by leading global consultancy McKinsey & Company. McKinsey’s Global Energy Perspective research was launched at a time when global energy markets are facing an unprecedented array of uncertainties, including […]

The Mars obsession: Are two planets better than one to ensure human survival?

One of the rationales suggested for going to Mars is that given all the vagaries of the universe, human culture would have a better chance of surviving far into the future if humans settled on two (or more) planets. In the abstract, this statement seems axiomatic. Before accepting this proposal, however, it might be worthwhile […]

The power of water

A great river encircles the world. It rises in the heartland of the United States and carries more water than the Mississippi and Yangtze rivers combined. One branch, its oldest, streams over the Atlantic, heading for Europe and the Middle East. Another crosses the Pacific, flowing towards China. Countless tributaries join along the way, draining […]

Global Oil And Gas Discoveries Set To Hit 75-Year Low In 2021

Global oil and gas discoveries in 2021 are on track to hit their lowest full-year level in 75 years should the remainder of December fail to yield any significant finds, Rystad Energy analysis shows. As of the end of November, total global discovered volumes this year are calculated at 4.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent […]

Has The EIA Massively Overestimated The Potential Of U.S. Shale?

Earth scientist David Hughes—who is out with a new skeptical report on the future of U.S. shale oil and gas—has two very important things in common with Michael Burry. Burry is the investor made famous by The Big Short, the book that was later turned into a movie of the same name about the 2008 housing crash. Both […]

GoM Reserve Revisions for 2019

Overview For 2019 BOEM showed a large increase in remaining reserves of 1.3Gboe,  91% of it oil, from newly discovered oil with Appomattox/Vicksburg and Vito the largest contributors at over 400mmboe each, followed by Buckskin and Kaikias, which are fairly large multi-well tie-backs, and smaller, one or two well  tie-backs of Blue Wing Olive, Constellation, Claibourne, Red […]

How Much of the Worsening Energy Crisis is Due to Depletion?

Coal and natural gas spot prices have recently soared to record levels internationally, while oil is trading at over $80 a barrel—the highest price in seven years. Newspaper columnists are asking whether people in Europe and Asia who can’t afford high fuel and electricity prices might freeze this winter. High natural gas prices are causing […]

China’s Sinopec, CNPC Discover More Oil, Natural Gas Resources

China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., aka Sinopec, has reportedly announced another oil and natural gas discovery in the Tarim Basin. The state-owned company said on Chinese social media that it had discovered 100 million tons of oil and gas resources in the legacy-producing region, according to Reuters. That’s roughly the equivalent of 733 million bbl […]

Iran’s Huge Caspian Gas Find Is A Geopolitical Gamechanger

Iran last week revealed a huge new gas deposit located in the Iranian sector of the Caspian Sea. The ‘Chalous’ structure is to be developed with the intention of forming a new gas hub in northern Iran to complement the southern gas hub centred on the massive South Pars field. The principal named developer of […]

Venezuela’s Oil Reserves Doomed To Become The World’s Largest Stranded Asset

The aggressive push to decarbonize the world economy is forcing big oil to examine how the carbon emissions of its operations can be reduced with a goal of becoming carbon neutral. That coupled with the threat of peak oil demand has seen oil supermajors reevaluate their business strategy, with many now choosing to eschew high-cost […]

The search for the world’s largest methane sources

The threat was invisible to the eye: tonnes of methane billowing skyward, blown out by natural gas pipelines snaking across Siberia. In the past, those plumes of potent greenhouse gas released by Russian petroleum operations last year might have gone unnoticed. But armed with powerful new imaging technology, a methane-hunting satellite sniffed out the emissions […]

Top 12 Recent Gulf of Mexico Discoveries

Gulf of Mexico (GOM) despite being capital intensive still competes with unconventional for the capital investment. The recent investors pressure, the low oil prices and thrust towards energy transition in wake of climate change has dampened the exploratory efforts but the trend clearly shows that companies that have competitive advantage will continue their exploration and […]

What Is Peak Oil? Have We Reached It?

Peak oil is the theoretical timeline for when domestic or global oil production will hit its maximum rate and begin to decline. It’s the idea that—at some point—the world’s finite quality and quantity of oil will decline to such low numbers that it would no longer be economic to produce. The concept has been the […]

Scientists develop ‘cheap and easy’ method to extract lithium from seawater

Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology developed what they believe is an economically viable system to extract high-purity lithium from seawater. Previous efforts to tease lithium from the mixture the metal makes together with sodium, magnesium and potassium in seawater yielded very little. Although the liquid contains 5,000 times more lithium than […]

Shell Makes Deepwater Discovery

Shell Offshore Inc, a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell plc (NYSE: RDS.A), has announced a “significant” discovery at the Leopard prospect in the deepwater U.S. Gulf of Mexico (GOM). The Leopard well encountered more than 600 feet of net oil pay at multiple levels, according to Shell, which said evaluation is ongoing to further define […]

Big Oil Is In Desperate Need Of New Discoveries

The year 2020 was a watershed moment for the fossil fuel sector. Faced with a global pandemic, severe demand shocks and a shift towards renewable energy, experts warned that nearly $900 billion worth of reserves–or about one-third of the value of big oil and gas companies–were at risk of becoming worthless. Even Big Oil mostly […]

Youngquist: the extraordinary geodestiny of Saudi Arabia and other gulf nations

Preface. I was fortunate enough to know Walter for 15 years. He became a friend and mentor, helping me learn to become a better science writer, and sending me material I might be interested in, and delightful pictures of him sitting in a lawn chair and feeding wild deer who weren’t afraid of him. I […]

The End of the Oil Age

For more than a century, the oil and gas industry has played a central role in almost every geopolitical development of consequence. Now that the fossil fuels’ days finally seem to be numbered, it is time to consider not just what will come next, but also what it will take to get there. Giuliano Garavini,The […]

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