[Graeme]

I also find it somewhat suspicious that Google is a member of ALEC:

The two web companies have become corporate leaders in renewable energy investments, powering data centers with wind and funding green projects around the globe. So why, then, are they members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a group mostly consisting of fossil fuel firms with open opposition to the growing renewables sector?

Facebook’s Sustainability Team leader Bill Weihl and Gary Demasi, director of global infrastructure at Google, were both asked that question at the recent Greening The Internet: How Leading Companies are Building a Green Web event in San Francisco, CA, but didn’t really address the clear contradiction within.

Google: Doing Evil with ALEC

Google has widely mythologized itself as some kind of humanistic techno-pioneer. Obscured in a fog of digital legend is the agenda that more than ever is transfixed with maximizing profits while capitalizing on anti-democratic leverage of corporate power. Google's involvement in ALEC is consistent with the company's mega-business model that relentlessly exploits rigorous data-mining of emails, online searches and so much more.

huffingtonpost

[Graeme]

In short, if Google belongs to ALEC, then they don't have any credibility when it comes to making statements about the future of RE.

[Graeme]

Let's not get sidetracked. I agree with OP. We are at that beginning of the end of the oil age.

[Graeme]

Did Peak Oil Arrive in 2014?

The recent price crash in crude oil, if it lasts for any length of time, will certainly affect oil production. The question is, just how great an effect will it have and how soon? But in this post I want to concentrate on what is, or was, happening to world oil production even before the price crash.

Russia, the largest producer of crude oil in the world, will peak in 2014. There are various estimates of how fast their production will decline but best case, for Russia, puts their decline at about 2% per year. They say they are depending on the Bazhenov Shale and Arctic offshore just to keep production flat in 2015. Well that is not going to happen, not in the next few years anyway. And if prices stay in the current range it is unlikely to ever happen.

OPEC is a wild card but there is little doubt that they are producing flat out right now. Only Iran has any real any real chance of increasing production very much and only if sanctions are lifted. While Libya has increased production significantly and may yet increase even further, the likelihood is that production will decline given the violent political instability in the country.


I believe non-OPEC production less US production will be down between .5 and 1 million barrels per day next year. And I believe it unlikely that US production will be able to offset that. OPEC is still the wild card but I think it is more likely their production will decline rather than increase.

Bottom line, it is obvious that we are on the cusp of peak oil and only the seemingly ever-increasing barrels from US shale oil production is keeping it at bay. But it now looks like that party is about to be over. I think it is very likely that peak oil has already arrived, if not this year then 2015 for sure.

oilprice

[Graeme]

Bank of England investigating risk of 'carbon bubble'

The Bank of England is to conduct an enquiry into the risk of fossil fuel companies causing a major economic crash if future climate change rules render their coal, oil and gas assets worthless.

The concept of a “carbon bubble” has gained rapid recognition since 2013, and is being taken increasingly seriously by some major financial companies including Citi bank, HSBC and Moody’s, but the Bank’s enquiry is the most significant endorsement yet from a regulator.

The concern is that if the world’s government’s meet their agreed target of limiting global warming to 2C by cutting carbon emissions, then about two-thirds of proven coal, oil and gas reserves cannot be burned. With fossil fuel companies being among the largest in the world, sharp losses in their value could prompt a new economic crisis.

Mark Carney, the bank’s governor, revealed the enquiry in a letter to the House of Commons environment audit committee (EAC), which is conducting its own enquiry. He said there had been an initial discussion within the bank on “stranded” fossil fuel assets.

“In light of these discussions, we will be deepening and widening our enquiry into the topic,” he said, involving the financial policy committee which is tasked with identifying systemic economic risks. Carney had raised the issue at a World Bank seminar in October.

theguardian

[Graeme]

What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change

Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will?

"Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach."

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change

The Strange Thing About Google’s Decision To Stop Renewable Energy Research

Two senior Google engineers have written a confusing article explaining what they learned after Google stopped its advanced research and development effort into renewable energy technologies in 2011.

The answer they offer — that their effort was not on track to deliver renewable R&D breakthroughs that by themselves would reverse climate change — has always been obvious and thus makes very little sense as a reason for giving up on such an important effort, as we will see.

More likely, Google saw renewable energy prices coming down so quickly as global deployment accelerated that they realized their chances to make money in the R&D arena were much smaller than they thought. And they clearly understood that the real action in advancing renewable energy was in deployment, which Google continued to fund at a far greater level than they ever invested in R&D.
The all-too-predictable result of the Google engineer’s confusing explanation was an article on Fox News with the headline, “Google engineers say renewable energy won’t solve climate change.” But that isn’t quite what Google concluded, although Fox News is, unsurprisingly, able to find an anti-science disinformer who thinks it is.

In their IEEE Spectrum article, the engineers explain that in 2007, Google launched the initiative “RE<C” which “aimed to develop renewable energy sources that would generate electricity more cheaply than coal-fired power plants do.” The term RE<C stands for “Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal.”

Now you might think RE<C was, sensibly, aimed at developing renewable sources that were cheaper than new coal-fired power plants — a worthwhile goal in 2007 and in 2011 and even now. Yes, we are rapidly approaching this goal and have achieved it in some parts of the world. Indeed, two months ago IEEE spectrum published an article explaining “Large wind and solar power farms have the economics to go toe-to-toe with the cheapest fossil fuel-based power supplies in the United States according to the venerable financial advisory firm Lazard Ltd.”

But it’s fair to say the entire technology and policy world believes continued R&D into renewables is valuable since anything that brings their cost down will bring down the overall cost of avoiding catastrophic climate change. Another plausible goal is competitive “dispatchable” renewable energy, “which can be ramped up and down quickly,” as the Google engineers put it (as opposed to only being usable when the sun shines or the wind blows). This might be solar or wind with some storage capability.

But apparently, Google’s goal was aimed at developing renewable sources that were simultaneously cheaper than existing coal-fired power plants — and dispatchable, too! Although Google’s RE<C website and 2007 news release don’t clarify the matter, the Google engineers say they were focused on research into “how a new energy technology could perform … a lot more cheaply than an existing coal-fired power plant already does.”

I point this out mainly because the goal of getting a new carbon-free energy technology to market at a price significantly cheaper than existing coal power … is widely believed to be impossible in a timescale that would matter to humanity. Back in the mid-1990s, I helped run what was then the largest R&D program in the world for developing carbon-free energy technology at the Department of Energy. I never met anyone there or in the past two decades with any actual R&D experience who ever thought such a goal was either plausible — or necessary.


Horsefeathers. It is more shocking that Google could possibly find it at all shocking that their goal of saving the world through breakthrough technology alone didn’t make any sense. The fact is we already have the technology (either on the market or in the development pipeline) as Princeton Profs Socolow and Pacala explained a decade ago in a 2004 paper in Science, “Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies.”

More here

[Graeme]

You didn't read what they said: IN THE R & D ARENA!

[Graeme]

Signs Of Peak Oil Starting To Emerge

What caused the recent crash in the oil price from $110 (Brent) in July to $70 today and what is going to happen next? With the world producing 94 Mbpd (IEA total liquids) $1.4 trillion has just been wiped off annualized global GDP and the incomes of producing and exporting nations. Energy will get cheaper again, for a while at least. The immediate impact is a reduction in global GDP and deflationary pressure. There is a lot of information to review and summarize and so this week and next we will present the story in stages culminating we hope with an oil market forecast scenario.


OECD oil consumption fell dramatically in the wake of the crash and has never recovered. The anti-fossil fuel lobby that seems to have the ear of most OECD governments and institutions will be pleased with this outcome. If you are Portuguese, Spanish, Italian or Greek and had to sell your car, less so.

Related: Did Peak Oil Arrive in 2014?

Global debt levels are clearly a part of the big picture which includes the expansion of debt in North America to expand LTO and shale gas production and expansion of debt in China to expand Chinese consumption. LTO and shale gas are both expensive to produce, and the conundrum that the producers and banks still face is how to rationalize over production of an expensive resource that dumps the price and creates a loss for both producer and bank.

Low oil price will have two predictable outcomes. It is going to result in reduced production, not only of LTO but across the whole oil market including OPEC. Even though OPEC voted to not reduce supply, the market forces that OPEC increasingly operates under will do the job involuntarily for them. A rout in the LTO producers is widely anticipated. And returning to Figure 1, low oil price is going to sharpen that oil production decline in the RoW. Possible to anticipate but impossible to forecast, global oil production will be heading down in the next 12 to 24 months. But lower prices are going to come as an enormous relief to consumers who will go out and consume more. The OECD and the RoW will emerge with reduced oil production capacity and increased thirst for oil.

oilprice

[Graeme]

Carbon bubble poses risk to financial system

Companies involved in fossil fuel extraction could see their value plummet overnight as the consequences of climate change become more apparent, a new report warns

A report by Scottish Environment LINK has warned that capitalisation of the oil and gas industry is largely based on the assumption that the world’s known reserves of oil, gas and coal can be extracted and burned.

However the International Energy Agency has warned that two thirds of the world’s fossil fuels must stay untapped in order to keep rising global temperatures to under two degrees and avoid ‘catastrophic’ climate change.

The report warns that when markets accept these reserves cannot be sold, the ‘carbon bubble’ created by overvalued assets will burst, creating global financial risk in the process – particularly for nations such as Scotland with heavy involvement in the fossil fuel industry.

The report says: “The carbon bubble could burst at any time. It will burst when the market accepts that not all fossil fuels are going to be burned. Carbon based assets could become stranded assets and lose value overnight, causing a financial shock which could pose a threat to economies whose financial sectors are heavily dependent on the fossil fuel industry.

“It could happen quickly in response to an international political agreement which commits governments to urgent action, but it may not necessarily depend on international agreement. It could happen as a reaction to extreme weather events which trigger national political commitments to action, or it may be that market forces, cheaper alternatives (for example solar energy reaching grid parity) or general behaviour change may influence it.”

The report also warns that a strong climate agreement in the Paris negotiations later this year could trigger a financial meltdown. Pension funds – often heavily invested in oil and gas assets – could be at particular risk.

Matthew Crighton, convener of the LINK's Economic Taskforce, said: “When investors catch up with the reality of a low carbon future, the bubble could burst with knock-on consequences for the whole economy”.

holyrood

[Keith_McClary]

The World Bank issued a report on global carbon pricing in May, 2014 which stated:

“Today, 39 national and 23 sub-national jurisdictions – responsible for almost a quarter of the global greenhouse gas emissions – have implemented or are scheduled to implement carbon pricing instruments, including emissions trading schemes and taxes, building the momentum for a bottom-up approach to climate action.”

Further, and perhaps even more interesting, in spite of a lack of bipartisan leadership in the US on the issue of climate change and pricing carbon, the capital markets are nevertheless imputing what amounts to a carbon tax on companies who are emitting greenhouse gases. KPMG, one of the largest accounting firms in the US, found that the markets are discounting corporate valuations at the rate of ~ $28/ton of carbon emitted. Clearly this figure needs to be higher but it is a start. KPMG states:

“Although federal regulation has yet to be adopted, our results suggest that the capital markets are already anticipating the effects of the costs of carbon emissions on firm value…These results are consistent with the argument that the capital markets impound both carbon emissions and the act of voluntary disclosure of this information in their firm valuations.”

And it doesn’t stop there. Standard&Poor’s, one of the preeminent ratings agencies has recently warned:

“Climate change is likely to be one of the global mega-trends impacting sovereign creditworthiness, in most cases negatively.”

http://energypolicyforum.org/2014/07/31 ... te-change/

[dohboi]

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... -scientist

‘The age of carbon is over’ and a transition to a greener economy is inevitable, says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, adviser to the German government and Pope Francis

An “induced implosion” of the fossil fuel industry must take place for there to be any chance of avoiding dangerous global warming, according to one of the world’s most influential climate scientists.

Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, an adviser to the German government and Pope Francis, said on Friday: “In the end it is a moral decision. Do you want to be part of the generation that screwed up the planet for the next 1,000 years? I don’t think we should make that decision.”

Schellnhuber was speaking at a major science conference in Paris, taking place before a crunch UN summit in December, also in the city, at which nations must seal a deal on global warming. World leaders were sent a stark message in the communique issued by the conference, which warned that the opportunity to avoid disaster is rapidly diminishing.

Laurence Tubiana, France’s climate change ambassador, said the aim of the UN summit is to send a signal that the transition from coal, oil and gas to a low-carbon economy is inevitable. If the aim is achieved, Tubiana told the Guardian, “you will see a massive acceleration [to a greener economy], particularly on the investment side in the next five years”.

The conference was addressed by Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who said the fossil fuel industry faced big challenges: “A mixture of many different changes going on – consumption patterns, civil society, political action – will be disruptive to the carbon economy.”

[ROCKMAN]

"Do you want to be part of the generation that screwed up the planet for the next 1,000 years? I don’t think we should make that decision.” I'll assume the "we" he refers to is the like-minded folks who were attending the conference with him. Unfortunately the "we" wouldn't include the vast majority of the folks on the planet and the politicians who would depended on that majority to vote them into office and keep them there.

[criticalmass]

Facts, Rock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_c ... by_country

55.5% of the globe perceived climate change as human caused back in 2008, with a rising % of global population learning through *gasp* education in the meantime. CCD's get so offended by common-sense.

[C8]

Recently there have been a number of posts here at PO.com joining the MSM chorus that fossil fuels are coming to an end. I wish that this were true- but I do not let my wishes cloud my eyes. The mantra of Fossil Fuels extinction is based on multiple false premises:

1.That while renewables technology is improving to make them cheaper, fossil fuel technology is standing still

WRONG: fossil fuel extraction tech may make it go even cheaper than Renewables for the next 20-40 year

A technological revolution spurred the U.S. oil boom that resulted in the greatest increase in domestic oil production in a century, and while that has stuttered in the face of a major oil price slump and an OPEC campaign to maintain a grip on market share, the American response could be another technological revolution that demonstrates that the first one was merely an impressive embryonic experiment.

It’s not only about shale now—it’s about reviving mature oil fields through advancements in enhanced oil recovery, potentially opening up not only new shale fields, but older fields that have been forgotten.

There are myriad gloom-and-doom stories about what is often alluded to as a short-lived oil boom in the U.S. But what many fail to understand is that revolutions of this nature are phased, with the advent of new technology typically followed by a temporary halt in progress while we study the results and come up with something even better.

There are two very interesting EOR advancements that have caught our attention in recent months: CO2 EOR and Plasma Pulse Technology (PPT).

CO2, or carbon dioxide EOR, involves injecting CO2 into ageing oil fields to sweep residual oil to the surface. In some cases, it can extend the production life of a field by more than 25 years. The U.S. is fortunate in this regard because it has a large volume of low-cost, naturally occurring CO2 at its disposal; however, in order to be widely employed the infrastructure to deliver it to oil fields has to be in place.

Visiongain estimates that global CO2 EOR spending will be $4.74 billion this year. “This will decline in the short term as low oil prices take their toll on the capital spending programmes of CO2 EOR operators, but is expected to rise rapidly in the next decade.”

Then we have something a bit more futuristic, even though it is already commercially viable—Plasma Pulse Technology, or PPT. This is a patent pending technology that enables the “re-opening” of wells without water, without polluting chemicals and without causing earthquakes. The ”re-opening” side of this equation means that it doesn’t open rock like fracking, rather it comes in afterwards and cleans up well bores to clear the pathway for oil to flow faster and more efficiently to the surface like it once did.

Plasma Pulse Technology (PPT) creates a controlled plasma arc within a vertical well, generating a tremendous amount of heat for a fraction of a second, while the subsequent high-speed hydraulic impulse wave emitted is strong enough to remove any clogged sedimentation from the perforation zone without damaging the steel casing. The series of impulse waves also penetrates deep into the reservoir, which re-opens reservoir permeability for up to a year per treatment.

What OPEC knows is this: The U.S. has over 21 billion barrels of oil that could be economically recovered with today’s EOR technologies. And according to figures from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Western Governors Association (WGA), further advances in this technology could cause that figure to double.

http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/OP ... -Boom.html

With enhanced extraction methods wells last much longer- heck that Red Queen is on the park bench eating a bag of Cheetos.

2.That governments are serious about creating binding agreements on reducing CO2

WRONG: every climate summit to date has produced more symbolism than substance and tons of loopholes. The US and China made a mockery of the last summit. There is NO international will to create a mechanism to punish nations for FF use and enforcement of this is impossible when the same nations are in a economic trade war with each other. Someone will always do business with bad actors to keep them going. Nobody has ever produced any evidence of the effectiveness of these summits. Look what has happened after Copenhagen:



3. Renewables are increasing greatly as a share of total energy production

WRONG: renewables are growing- but at a deadly snail's pace and have no hope of even becoming a majority source of energy this century. The real story of the first 15 years of this century is not the growth of renewables- but the growth of fossil fuels

Unlike the posts of the renewable energy Pollyannas who just keep posting fluff opinion pieces- I support my arguments with data

[Apneaman]

Oh way to crush the peoples hopes of a green energy utopian future. My prediction for COP21 this fall is that it will be all so very thrilling and the lefty greenies along with governments will hail it as victory for all mankind and other self congratulatory self important bullshit. Then next February we will look at the Keeling curve and see that it has risen again along with methane, ape population, 6th mass extinction, sea level rise, ocean acidification, soil erosion, glacier and snow-pack melt down, forest/wildfires, dead zones and every other negative metric. Most importantly, there are too many unstoppable positive self reinforcing feedback loops in play, so what we do now no longer matters. Inertia is a bitch and the negative consequences of climate change are non linear. There are no plans to stop burning fossil carbon and there never were. Which is fine by me cause that will bring it on all the quicker and who would not want to be around for the end? Greatest show on earth.


There are 2,100 new coal plants being planned worldwide — enough to cook the planet


http://www.vox.com/2015/7/9/8922901/coa ... ce-numbers

[ROCKMAN]

“The U.S. is fortunate in this regard because it has a large volume of low-cost, naturally occurring CO2 at its disposal...". No, it doesn't. The vast majority of US oil fields have no access to CO2. I looked at a field in west Texas a year ago that has over 700 million bbls of PROVED oil reserves at only 2,400'. It had recovered about 11% of the original in place oil. Two offset fields have had CO2 injected for a good while and have increased recovery to around 25%. But those 700 million bbls? The field is producing just 60 bopd because there is no additional CO2 available…it’s all going to the other the other fields in the area. Maybe in 15 or 20 years when those other fields are depleted this field might get the CO2…if there’s any left at that time. A little critical thinking: if just an additional 15% of that oil could be recovered by EXISTING technology that would be over 100 million bbls of oil worth more than $6 BILLION AT TODAY’S PRICES. So a company is just producing 60 bopd when they could be producing tens of thousands on bopd...and aren’t doing it???

And those few areas that do have CO2 supplies pay at the market rate. For instance there's just one company that owns all the naturally occurring CO2 east of the Mississippi River. And you either pay their asking price or you don't get the CO2. But that price is relatively cheap compared to the pipeline infrastructure needed to get the CO2 to the fields.

As far as potential EOR: every field that's a candidate for whatever appropriate EOR method has had, and is currently having, that method applied. The average US well produces less than 15 bopd. Essentially stripper production. And guess why so many of those little wells are still producing: EOR. There is no big inventory of fields waiting for EOR methods that currently exist. And if PPT works economically...that's great. Just let us know when the first project is producing any oil at a profit. Until then it represents zero potential.

So, all those who wish to kneel at the altar of the EOR God: post a list of all the NEW EOR projects that were begun when oil was floating over $100/bbl and tell me how many more you’re expecting with oil around $60/bbl.

[Plantagenet]

People keep forgetting that natural gas is also a fossil fuel.

President Obama himself pointed out that the US gas a 100-year-supply of NG, and FF will not be "finished" until NG is finished.

Cheers!