Author: ASPO-USA

For the first time since the industrial revolution the world is moving into an era without a dominant energy source. That’s the assertion of global oil giant BP, which is also offering a reality check on the notion of peak oil. The company’s general manager of global energy markets and US economics, Mark Finley, is adamant that natural gas, coal and oil will all scrap for the top spot over the next two decades. The assertion comes on the back of a January release of BP’s latest 2035 energy market outlook, which highlighted a convergence of the fuels at the top of the energy tree in 20 years’ time. BP’s peak oil rejection Source: BP Energy Market Outlook 2035. “We’ve never seen this before,” Finley explains of the fight for the top spot during a recent speech at Columbia University in New York. “Personally, I think it poses some […]

Click here to view full article at www.businessspectator.com.au

It is ironic that, just as we are finally saying goodnight and farewell to Peak Oil theory, scientists are poised to bring unlimited quantities of the finest sweet crude oil to market, courtesy of algae and sunlight. Moreover, the algae route to creating oil is said to generate 95% fewer greenhouse gasses than the conventional route of drilling for oil , so, even if climate change activists would rather that we stopped using oil altogether, “green oil” goes a long way towards meeting most of their objections. The technology is not new. Research has been going on for at least the last 30 years, but for much of that time, scientists found that they were having to put more energy into the process to grow the algae and extract the oil, than was contained in the oil – not exactly a winning proposition. […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

Figure 1 A recent post at Peak Oil Barrel by Jean Laherrere suggested an ultimate recoverable resource(URR) for the North Dakota Bakken/Three Forks of about 2.5 Gb based on Hubbert Linearization.  This conflicts with a recent (April 2013) USGS mean (F50) estimate of 8.4 Gb.  I decided to update my scenarios based on the range of USGS estimates from F95=6 Gb to F5=11.3 Gb for the North Dakota(ND) Bakken/ Three Forks.  Note that at year end 2011 there were 2.6 Gb of crude proven reserves in ND and at the end of 2007 about 0.5 Gb, I will assume all of this reserve increase came from the Bakken/ Three Forks, so 2.1 Gb of proven reserves added to 0.35 Gb of oil produced from the Bakken/ Three Forks gives us 2.45 Gb for a minimum URR.  The Hubbert Linearization points to about 0.05 Gb of undiscovered oil whereas the USGS […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

Page added on February 8, 2014   “To me at least the connection is clear and statistically certain… far more certain than anything I ever see in the stock market or the economy.” That’s Jeremy Grantham, the highly-regarded co-founder of the $117 billion investment fund GMO, who predicted both the dot com crash of the late 1990s and the subprime meltdown a few years later. Above is an accompanying chart included in his  latest investment letter . Rather than pushing an investment idea here, he’s convinced there’s a causal link between a surge in earthquakes measuring above 3 on the richter scale in the US and the boom in  hydraulic fracturing  (“fracking”), the controversial drilling technique used to extract oil and gas from shale rock. His overall skepticism about fracking informs Grantham’s broader, bearish thesis about oil prices. In the investment letter he questions whether “this year’s $650 billion spent looking […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

Page added on February 8, 2014 Climate change is the reality we are living in. It is not going away; it has been clearly established as a fact, IOMCO — or immediately obvious to the most casual observer. The weather is simply becoming more extreme. More tornados, more flooding, more drought, stronger hurricanes and other extreme weather events are only the tip of the iceberg. Climate change is not something that you can change overnight. It has taken a few hundred years for man to have the negative impact that it has on the climate; even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels tomorrow, it would take hundreds more to reverse the trend. We hit the big time lottery when we discovered oil and gas. It was like we stumbled upon a treasure chest with millions of years of stored energy and just like some lottery winners, we became […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

Jeremy Grantham, whose GMO LLC investment firm manages $117 billion in assets, says the Great American Shale Boom is a dangerous waste of time and money. Grantham, who started his career as an economist at Shell, recently contemplated attending an anti-Keystone Pipeline demonstration in front of the White House.  In his new letter to clients , Grantham explains why any country, from the U.S. to China, still going down the path of developing fossil fuels is walking into a trap.  First, he argues we are overstating the benefits of switching to natural gas: “Fracking gas,” like all natural gas, is basically methane. Methane unfortunately is an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2: at an interval of 100 years it is now estimated to be 32 times as bad, and at 20 years to be 72 times worse! If it leaks from well head to […]

Click here to view full article at www.businessinsider.com

Page added on February 6, 2014 How long can economic growth continue in a finite world? This is the question the 1972 book The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows and others sought to answer. The computer models that the team of researchers produced strongly suggested that the world economy would collapse sometime in the first half of the 21st century. I have been researching what the real situation is with respect to resource limits since 2005. The conclusion I am reaching is that the team of 1972 researchers were indeed correct. In fact, the promised collapse is practically right around the corner, beginning in the next year or two. In fact, many aspects of the collapse appear already to be taking place, such as the 2008-2009 Great Recession and the collapse of the economies of many smaller countries such as Greece and Spain. How could collapse be so […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

Gasoline-like fuels can be made from cellulosic materials such as farm and forestry waste using a new process invented by chemists at the University of California, Davis. The process could open up new markets for plant-based fuels, beyond existing diesel substitutes. “What’s exciting is that there are lots of processes to make linear hydrocarbons, but until now nobody has been able to make branched hydrocarbons with volatility in the gasoline range,” said Mark Mascal, professor of chemistry at UC Davis and lead author on the paper published Jan. 29 in the journal  Angewandte Chemie . Traditional diesel fuel is made up of long, straight chains of carbon atoms, while the molecules that make up gasoline are shorter and branched. That means gasoline and diesel evaporate at different temperatures and pressures, reflected in the different design of diesel and gasoline engines. Biodiesel, refined from plant-based oils, is already commercially available […]

Click here to view full article at northdenvernews.com

At the risk of starting a cat fight where truth may too quickly become a casualty, why don’t we more forcefully challenge those who deny peak oil (and global warming) and who do so for reasons that generally ignore reality in favor of narrowly-defined interests? Those motivations will ultimately do nothing but promote more eventual harm by denying the truths to those who clearly need them the most…. Of course, we run the risk of getting bogged down in he said/she-said arguments that quickly devolve into the lowest forms of ‘debate’, but why let those types of offerings go unchallenged? They feed on themselves, and it is tiresome and time-consuming to have to rebut all the nonsense. But if we don’t, uninformed readers and listeners have no reason to at least consider the possibility that there may indeed be other facts out there […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

In order to understand what solutions to our energy predicament will or won’t work, it is necessary to understand the true nature of our energy predicament. Most solutions fail because analysts assume that the nature of our energy problem is quite different from what it really is. Analysts assume that our problem is a slowly developing long-term problem, when in fact, it is a problem that is at our door step right now. The point that most analysts miss is that our energy problem behaves very much like a near-term financial problem . We will discuss why this happens. This near-term financial problem is bound to work itself out in a way that leads to huge job losses and governmental changes in the near term. Our mitigation strategies need to be considered […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com