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When is the oil going to run out – and should we worry about it?

When is the oil going to run out – and should we worry about it? Page added on November 17, 2013 Energy experts have warned recently that Britain currently stores enough natural gas for only thirteen days of supply. Such a stark reality indicates how little reserve actually exists to fall back on. The news also brings to mind the concept of energy and fossil fuel shortage, depicted in movies such as ‘Mad Max’. But with our entire economy and way of life dependent on one particular fossil fuel, namely crude oil, how long can we expect this commodity to last, and for the present levels of production to be maintained? A study by a German think tank published in September, 2010 , warned of the potential for a dire global economic crisis in the next fifteen years as a result of a peak and irreversible decline in world […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Update on Peak Oil

Page added on November 17, 2013 I summarized my attitudes to Peak Oil in an (anonymous) contribution to the Azimuth discussion a couple of years ago, reproduced below. It seems right [except the dubious comment on shale oil was way off]. World economic growth continues to be constrained by the fact that we can only slowly change infrastructure. Fossil fuel use continues to grow as we go to gas and back to coal for many applications. The world peak is different to the peaks we’ve seen in individual countries and fields, because the price can now rise. This should mean that the tail is more stretched out as otherwise uneconomic fields come into play (like tar sands, very heavy oil, coal liquefaction, abandoned fields, and maybe even oil shales). Also it means that there is a lot of pressure to get off oil as much as possible. Even the […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Recollecting the false messiah of peak oil

Page added on November 14, 2013 Oil prices continue to decline, with WTI currently leading the charge: So where are the oil bulls of 2008 now? Hard to say. But long-standing oil market watcher Stephen Schork, of the Schork Report, offers some colourful views on the topic this Wednesday. They come in the shape of a somewhat self-congratulatory nostalgic yarn, but it is worth the read, in so much as it really takes you back to how things were back in those scary September days. Here he goes: Back in September 2008 we were in Vienna giving a presentation to our friends at OPEC. In between copious amounts of Sachetorte and Grüner Veltliner, we had the opportunity to sit down with one of the largest hedge fund managers in Austria. At the time, crude oil on the NYMEX was imploding. That is to say, after peaking at a record […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Peak Energy

I never cease to be amazed by how many people misunderstood (or more likely, never read) The Limits To Growth . Paddy Manning at Crikey has an article both outlining a recent example and being one itself, as Paddy infuriatingly describes “Limits” as making a forecast rather than what it actually did – which was describe a set of scenarios based on a range of assumptions – Beware Hugh Morgan and the climate sceptic zombie attack! . If Hugh Morgan is saying it, it must be wrong. Recall the businessman’s previous campaign against the High Court’s Mabo decision — which extended to a defence of terra nullius and warnings that Australia’s territorial integrity was under threat — or his glowing 2010 endorsement of the young Australian Workers’ Union boss Paul Howes as a future Labor leader, after his starring role unseating a first-term prime minister. And so it was again yesterday with Morgan’s […]

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Dueling forecasts: Why our energy future is actually a risk management problem

Optimistic, but unwarranted, energy supply forecasts permeate the media (courtesy of the oil and gas industry) even as the occasional dire scenario gets coverage. But, it is well to remember that none of people making forecasts can know the one thing they all desperately want to know: the future. The most important thing you need to understand about forecasts–any forecast–is that their accuracy deteriorates rapidly, the further they go into the future. Surprisingly, almost no one who makes public energy supply forecasts acknowledges this; otherwise, we would see what statisticians call error bars –very large ones–in all these forecasts. In layman’s terms, the further out a forecast goes, the wider the range of possible outcomes–so much so that for long-term forecasts the range of outcomes is far more important than the middle estimate. But, this kind of waffling doesn’t get headlines. Humans are evolutionarily disposed to listen to those […]

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Peak Oil: Using Energy To Get Energy

General Ideas For parallelism with the language of finance, net energy should refer to energy produced minus energy invested, whereas EROI should refer to energy produced divided by energy invested…. The relationship between ROI and EROI is actually very simple and logical. The more energy you have to invest to produce a fuel, the lower your EROI will be. The energy you invest has a cost. Therefore, the profit on the same barrel of oil will be higher when it’s produced from a high EROI source than when produced from a low EROI source. [1] The optimists believe that our energy problems have been largely solved. I wouldn’t bet on that. The real issue with oil isn’t how much we have or even whether we can continue to increase  production. That’s what peak oil had come to represent and why, in retrospect, it was a misleading term. Rather, what […]

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10 Years After 'The Party's Over': an interview with Richard Heinberg

10 Years After ‘The Party’s Over’: an interview with Richard Heinberg While running the risk of sounding like a Hello! Magazine reporter, I must introduce this post by saying that while in the US recently, I joined Richard Heinberg and his wife Janet in their beautiful permaculture garden in Santa Rosa, California.  Richard will be known to most readers of this blog as the author of  The Party’s Over, Powerdown, The Oil Depletion Protocol, Peak Everything, Blackout  and  Snake Oil  as well as one of the best communicators on the whole peak oil/everything question.  This year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of  The Party’s Over .  Richard has already reflected on this in September’s Museletter [ 10 Years After ], but Richard and I pulled up a chair under a tree in his garden and chatted more about the book, its impact, and other related issues.  You transcript […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple