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Can’t outrun peak oil

On the other hand, domestic oil production has taken a jump in recent years due to fracking, tar sands, deepwater drilling, etc., but oil and other fuels obtained from those sources are actually more expensive and take more energy to get than oil obtained from conventional wells. This is what’s called the EROEI ratio, which stands for “Energy Returned On Energy Invested.” According to data compiled by professor L. David Roper, in the early 20th century, the golden age of North American oil production, the equivalent of one barrel of oil invested yielded as many as 100-200 barrels produced. By 1970, the average EROEI ratio for crude oil had fallen to 30:1 (Saudi oil fields are still producing at this rate). Today, one barrel of oil invested typically gives only 15 barrels in return. New technologies, such as tar sands, have a barely 2:1 ration of energy return on […]

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15 Things the World Is Running Out of

We live in an era of limited resources—peak oil, peak phosphorous, peak everything. With the world population at nearly 7.4 billion and people living increasingly energy-intensive lifestyles, there has never been a more pressing need to conserve natural resources and develop renewable energy sources. A recent report from James Hansen and 16 other leading climate experts found that the international target of limiting global temperatures to a 2°C rise this century will not be nearly enough to prevent catastrophic melting of ice sheets that would raise sea levels much higher and much faster than previously thought possible. To make matters even worse, as 2015 shapes up to be the hottest year on record , scientists warn the world is set to pass the 1°C point this year. The icing on the cake? We won’t even have wine, coffee, tequila or chocolate to cope with runaway climate change .

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‘Perfect Storm’ Engulfing Canada’s Economy Perfectly Predictable

That’s one dark perfect storm. Oil rig photo via Shutterstock. Economists, an irrational tribe of short-sighted mathematicians, are now calling Canada’s declining economic fortunes "a perfect storm." It seems to be the only weather that complex market economies generate these days, or maybe such things are just another face of globalization. In any case, economists now lament that low oil prices have upended the nation’s trade balance: "Canada has posted trade deficits every month this year, and the cumulative 2015 total of $13.6 billion is a record, exceeding the next highest, in 2009, of $2.95 billion." But this unique perfect storm gets darker. China, which Harperites eagerly embraced as the globe’s autocratic growth locomotive , has run out of steam. As the country’s notorious industrial revolution unwinds, China’s stock market has imploded. Communist party cadres are now putting their money in foreign housing markets in places like Vancouver. Throughout […]

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Peak oil, Peak gold, Peak everything – coming disaster for everyone

The global financial and political scene is now undergoing a transition that goes largely unnoticed and escapes general comprehension. Many facts and indicators provide mounting evidence that the status of the US dollar as international reserve currency is being seriously threatened by the BRICS economic block and that alternative arrangements for international trade and commerce, planned two or three years ago, are being systematically implemented via the Asia Infrastructure and Investment Bank and the Shanghai Gold Exchange. It might seem puzzling to some why any change would be necessary. The only logical explanation is that the super-elite group of bankers and royal families that secretly control global affairs have come to realize what’s threatening the world’s future prosperity today. Even though governments are not discussing this, statistics that apply the correct accounting and forecasting methods show that we reached peak oil in 2014. Many industry experts contend that 2015 […]

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Why the cash economy in Greece may be ending

Many believe we have a teetering world economy, even without Greece as an indicator. Now Greece is looming ever larger as a critical if unknown actor. It is mostly considered a bad one, for the entire European, and even the worldwide, financial system and economy. The Greek economy is approaching an almost unprecedented standstill. For clear reasons it probably will never get back to a "normal" or desirable level of consumption. When stepping back from witnessing the daily crisis, it would appear timely to ask what are the real factors in the big picture? Was the crisis brought on just by second-rate policies combined with inefficiency, corruption, and oppression? Or have longer-term characteristics of industrialism and Western Civilization’s relentless, aggressive growth caught up with us to undermine our future as a species? If so, the discussion about what’s wrong and how to deal with it has to change, and […]

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Shale Gas Bulldozer Runs Over Pessimists

“…why do operators keep drilling while their own over-production has depressed the price of natural gas by half of its value?” Art Berman, 2010 Thirty years ago, at an energy conference at M.I.T., I made a presentation about our research on natural gas supply, and opened with a joke. (That is, intentional humor.) The gas industry, I noted, kept saying that prices were too low to cover their costs, while continuing to drill. What could explain this? Management psychology? Animal spirits? Finance theory (option valuations)? No, the explanation was found in “The Journal of Abnormal Psychology.” The joke was much appreciated, except by the natural gas producers in the audience. Now, the same question could be raised. After all, for most of a decade, predictions of a production collapse have floated around the punditsphere, while estimates of the breakeven price have tended to be well above those which have […]

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China Peak Oil: 2015 Is the Year

Image Credit: REUTERS/Stringer Domestic production looks set to peak, with some profound implications for the world market. Intense focus on the North American shale boom, Saudi Arabia, and ISIS obscures an important emerging energy trend: China’s oil production is peaking. This has profound implications for the world oil market, because China is not just a massive importer of crude; it is also among the world’s five largest oil producers , trailing only the U.S., Russia, and Saudi Arabia, and virtually neck-in-neck with Canada. China’s oil industry has delivered impressive oil and gas production growth over the past decade. Yet a range of data and historical analogies increasingly suggest that, at global oil prices between $50-to-$100 per barrel, China’s oil supply capability is plateauing and may peak as soon as this year. Lower or higher prices would accelerate or extend this timing. China’s crude oil output has stagnated for the […]

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How Pope Francis’s climate encyclical is liberating the world

Pope Encyclical Quote In my life there are two things that have the effect of at least somewhat isolating me from others. The first is being a writer on climate change, peak oil, and the economic crises bound up with those modern predicaments. The other is being a Christian environmentalist. In the first case, my essays, as well as my social media presence, fairly well run counter to the whole of my society and culture, even when a few outliers add concurring thoughts to the mix. But in the end, by writing a write a blog about what people shouldn’t do, about the things we should give up and forsake for a concept of the greater good, about the ways our habits imperil the world and especially our children and future generations, I can kind of come off like a scold even in my most mild iteration. Even when […]

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Two Billion People Are Running out of Water

Forget about peak oil—we should be worrying about peak water: Groundwater basins that supply 2 billion people are being rapidly depleted , according to a new study. Worse: No one knows how long those reserves will last. A research team led by scientists at the University of California, Irvine, examined the world’s 37 largest aquifers between 2003 and 2013 and found that one-third of them were “stressed,” meaning more water was being removed than replenished, according to one of two studies published Tuesday in the journal Water Resources Research . The eight worst-off aquifers, labeled “overstressed,” had virtually no natural replenishment to offset human consumption. The scientists determined the Northwest Sahara Aquifer System, which supplies water to 60 million people, to be the most overstressed. The Indus Basin aquifer of northwestern India and Pakistan is the second-most overstressed, followed by the Murzuk-Djado Basin in northern Africa. California’s Central Valley […]

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Peak Oil: Myth Or Coming Reality?

In 1956, a geoscientist named M. King Hubbert formulated a theory which suggested that U.S. oil production would eventually reach a point at which the rate of oil production would stop growing. After production hit that peak, it would enter terminal decline. The resulting production profile would resemble a bell curve and the point of maximum production would be identified as Peak Oil, a point of no return. The original peak oil curve Image Source: Cornell University Hubbert first predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in 1970 and then start declining rapidly. His prediction turned out to be partly true, as U.S. crude oil production peaked that same year, not to be eclipsed again until the shale boom began. Annual crude oil production (in thousands of barrels per year) for entire United States, with contributions from individual regions as indicated. “The end of the oil age is in […]

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