Category: Peak Oil

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 […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

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 […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

On 12 November the International Energy Agency (IEA) released this year’s edition of their World Energy Outlook report, WEO-2013. I have not studied all the detail in the report but Continue Reading

Three things you shouldn’t miss this week The dwindling emissions budget if we are to limit global warming to no more than 2°C. International Energy Agency World Energy Outlook 2013 Continue Reading

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 […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

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 […]

Click here to view full article at peakenergy.blogspot.co.uk

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 […]

Click here to view full article at www.resilience.org

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 […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

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 […]

Click here to view full article at www.resilience.org

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 […]

Click here to view full article at www.resilience.org

Page added on November 5, 2013 (Paper produced after a presentation at the Fenner Conference on Population, Resources and Climate Change: Implications for Australia’s Near Future , Canberra, October 2013) A formal definition of “energy” is “the capacity to do work”. The overwhelming majority – ~80%) of the work done in our advanced technological society (i.e. the “economic activity”) is done using the energy released by burning fossil fuels [1]. In fact, even a large part of the work done by humans themselves can be attributed to fossil fuels since 30% of all fossil fuel use is for growing, processing, distributing and cooking the food that powers human bodies [2]. Of course, food production is vital when considering the future of our nation of Australia and of world civilization. The act of people living in cities (the origin of the word “civilisation”) is only possible when farmers produce food […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

Consumption A Citi Research report on so-called peak oil demand has been drawing a lot of attention lately . Understandably: what could be bigger news for anyone concerned with climate change, energy security, etc.? The report comes out hot right from the start, suggesting “The End is Nigh” and we are “Approaching a Tipping Point” on global oil demand. Unfortunately, though, it’s less than persuasive. The first thing that ought to raise an eyebrow or two is how wildly Citi’s analysis diverges from that of established data information centers like the International Energy Agency and the US Energy Information Administration —not to mention our own Roadmap Model , or Exxon Mobil , or really anyone else at all—on the demand for oil from transportation and other global activity, based on known business-as-usual practices, vehicle ownership and activity, technology trends, and adopted policies. One explanation for that divergence is that […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

What’s After Oil ? If you’re wondering about the direction of gasoline prices over the long term, forget for a moment about OPEC quotas and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and consider instead the matter of Hubbert’s Peak. That’s not a place, it’s a concept developed a half-century ago by a geologist named M. King Hubbert, and it explains a lot about what’s going on today at the gas pump. Hubbert argued that at a certain point oil production peaks, and thereafter it steadily declines regardless of demand. In 1956 he predicted that U.S. oil production would peak about 1970 and decline thereafter. Skeptics scoffed, but he was right. It now appears that world oil production, about 80 million barrels a day, will soon peak. In fact, conventional oil production has already peaked and is declining. For every 10 barrels of conventional oil consumed, only four new […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

Fossil fuels will continue to dominate the energy sector for the foreseeable future, after a report issued by the World Energy Council made it clear that fears expressed in respect of so-called “peak oil” were unlikely to be realized within the next forty years at least. Following the recent World Energy Congress in Daegu, Korea, Christoph Frei, Secretary General of the WEC said that the chances of the world running out of oil were slim, citing the fact that global reserves of the engineering resource were 25 percent higher than in 1993 while production has increased by 20 percent. According to Canada’s Financial Post, the WEC report demonstrates two potential scenarios for the energy industry, both of which include the implementation of renewable sources, and fossil fuels remain the dominant factor in both. “Our latest World Energy Resources report shows that ‘peak oil’ has moved into a far future. […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

No need to panic about ‘peak oil’ Page added on October 21, 2013 SO MUCH for “peak oil” alarmism, the dire warnings of a looming economic catastrophe when global crude oil production reaches its maximum rate and then starts to decline. Such cries of imminent doom reached a crescendo in 2008, when the oil price hit record levels on soaring demand and restricted supplies, topping out at $145/barrel. But then came the US subprime collapse, closely followed by international banking and sovereign debt crises, a liquidity freeze and global recession. Demand for oil fell back sharply, along with economic growth, taking the pressure off the market and causing the oil price to plunge. Peak oil crisis averted. But for how long, the pessimists cried? Demand may have fallen off temporarily, but the peak oil problem relates to supply; when the world economy starts growing again, consumers regain confidence and […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

IMG_4816               An observation worth noting … and pondering, from Steve LeVine :  If Montana is a microcosm of the world, one message to glean is that we are not in the midst of a decades-long flood of oil supply in the United States, as many suggest. Instead, the red lights are blinking across the exuberant U.S. oil patch. As  you recall, much has been made in recent months about the momentous prospects for U.S. oil and gas, which are said to be leading a global fossil fuel revolution, with meaningful implications for fortune-hunters and geopolitical players alike: North America will be independent of outside oil producers, the U.S. will experience an industrial revolution, and OPEC will drift into laggardly inconsequence. So what to think about the latest news from folks approaching the punch bowl with bad intentions? Let’s start with Montana, and […]

Click here to view full article at peakoilmatters.com