Category: Peak Oil

It all started with peak oil, the point when the maximum rate of extraction is reached, after which production begins to decline By Gwynne Dyer PEAK OIL is so last year. Now we can worry about peak everything: peak food, peak soil, peak fertiliser, even peak bees. Let’s start small. We depend on bees to pollinate plants that account for about one-third of the world’s food supply, but since 2006 bee colonies in the United States have been dying off at an unprecedented rate. More recently the same “colony collapse disorder” has appeared in China, Egypt and Japan. Many suspect that the main cause is a widely used type of pesticides called neonicotinoids, but the evidence is not yet conclusive. The fact remains that one-third of the American bee population has disappeared in the past decade. If the losses spread and deepen, we may face serious food shortages. Then […]

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It is quite obvious that high oil prices in the last 3-4 years Fig 1: WTI spot prices to 23/1/2015 http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=rwtc&f=w have reduced demand for oil, as shown in this IEA graph for OECD countries: Fig 2: Oil demand in OECD countries Oct 2011 – Sep 2014 https://www.iea.org/oilmarketreport/omrpublic/charts/ So which oil is affordable? Let’s use a graph of the Monetary Policy Report (January 2015) of the Bank of Canada (which would be favourable to Canadian tar sands) Fig 3: Oil production by area and full-cycle costs The Bank of Canada report reads: “Based on recent estimates of production costs, roughly one-third of current production could be uneconomical if prices stay around US$60, notably high-cost production in the United States, Canada, Brazil and Mexico (Chart 4). More than two-thirds of the expected increase in the world oil supply would similarly be uneconomical. A decline in private and public investment in […]

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The Problem Isn’t That We Have Too Little Oil. We Have Too Much and are Cooking the Planet With It. In 1977 Isaac Asimov wrote of “The Nightmare Life Without Fuel.” Writing in the wake of the first Middle East oil shock, Asimov imagined cars and air conditioning as distant memories, cities mined for valuable minerals and hardware, and the last barrels of oil hoarded for agricultural and military purposes. A future of scarcity seemed in the cards after the 1979 revolution in Iran disrupted global supplies, reviving gas lines and rationing in the United States, and sending oil prices to a stratospheric $117 a barrel in today’s dollars. The U.S. economy plunged into recession for the second time in a decade. Inflation, food prices and unemployment all shot up. Energy-importing Third World nations were devastated as expensive crude depleted their treasuries even as the U.S. Federal Reserve jacked […]

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Forget peak oil; we’ve reached peak everything thumbnail Peak oil is so last year. Now we can worry about peak everything: peak food, peak soil, peak fertilizer, even peak bees. Let’s start small. We depend on bees to pollinate plants that account for about one-third of the world’s food supply, but since 2006 bee colonies in the United States have been dying off at an unprecedented rate. More recently the same “colony collapse disorder” has appeared in China, Egypt, and Japan. Many suspect that the main cause is a widely used type of pesticides called neonicotinoids, but the evidence is not yet conclusive. The fact remains that one-third of the American bee population has disappeared in the past decade. If the losses spread and deepen, we may face serious food shortages. Then there’s peak fertilizer, or more precisely peak phosphate rock. Phosphorus is a critical ingredient of fertilizer, and […]

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World’s renewable resources reach limit thumbnail Renewable resources representing 45 per cent of global calorie intake have reached peak production levels Peak oil has become a familiar term over the past decade, but the world will soon have to get used to peak rice, peak wheat and peak maize, according to new research from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research . ‘Peak oil seemed believable because oil is a limited resource, but surprisingly our methodology in this study could not prove it,’ says Ralf Seppelt, a landscape ecologist working on the project. Money and innovation from the oil industry has seen peak oil recede as a risk, according to the research. The Helmholtz study found that while peak oil is not a cause for concern, renewable resources have reached the limit for annual growth. Among the 20 renewables studied, 18 – including meat production and the global fish catch […]

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Since weak oil demand growth is a major ingredient in the current oil price crash, higher demand stimulated by low prices could be a moderating factor. While US demand has risen since prices fell, there are several reasons why the global response may be slower to appear and less dramatic. One of the main factors that will determine the depth and duration of the current slump in oil prices is the extent and timing of a resulting rebound in demand. It is likely to occur first in countries like the US, where fuel taxes are low and consumers see the results of lower oil prices at the gas pump relatively quickly–a $1.65 per gallon drop already, since June. However, other factors besides taxes could impede faster demand growth elsewhere. From 2007 to 2009 the combination of high oil prices and a weak economy reduced US petroleum demand by almost […]

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Iraqi onlookers stand next to a burnt car following a motorcycle bombing attack which killed at least eight people on September 19, 2014 in the northern city of Kirkuk.(Getty) For Kirkuk, its oil-rich surroundings have been more a curse than a blessing. The northern Iraqi city struck black gold in 1927, while still under the control of the British Empire, and became the country’s oil production powerhouse in the north. At its peak, its oil fields were pumping out 3.2 billion barrels per day, but this has since fallen sharply amid war and mismanagement by the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who seized control in 1968. Kirkuk is in what is now Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region of Iraq, and was for years a multi-ethnic city. Many Kurds, who make up the bulk of the 850,000 population, had arrived in Kirkuk in search of work in the city’s oil industry. […]

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A new poll of American scientists suggests that a large majority of them (82 percent) regard population growth as a major challenge, almost as many as those who believe that climate change is mostly due to human activity (87 percent). The poll, which was conducted by the Pew Research Center, indicates that a clear majority of the American public (59 percent) are concerned that there won’t be enough food and resources to accommodate a growing world population, but the level of concern in the scientific community, as with climate change, is noticeably higher. On one level, the poll results are not surprising. For decades now leading scientists have been warning that humanity is overusing planetary resources and inflicting dangerous harm on the environment. Earlier this month 18 scientists authored a paper in the journal Science warning that humanity is encroaching on nine “planetary boundaries,” and that we have already […]

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In this life nothing is certain. Therefore I am not declaring, absolutely, that we are at peak oil, only that it is a near certainty. But I am putting my reputation on the line in making the claim that the period, September 2014 through August 2015 will be the year of Peak Oil. Below are my reasons for making this claim. First of all, Peak Oil is not a theory. The claim that Peak Oil is a theory is more than a little absurd. Fossil hydrocarbons were created from buried alga millions of years ago and they are finite in quantity. And as long as we keep extracting them in the millions of barrels per day, it is only common sense that one day we will reach a point where their extraction starts to decline. In fact most countries where oil is extracted are already in decline. So obviously […]

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Shale oil’s investment cycle is shorter and its decline profile sharper than conventional oil production. Current indicators suggest legacy declines from shale will catch up fast with the industry. This points to a sharp deceleration in US shale oil output. But, while conventional oil takes time to slow down, it also takes time to speed up. It will be shale that is best placed to benefit from any oil price recovery, as Ross McCracken, managing editor of Platts Energy Economist , explains in this month’s selection from the publication. The full analysis can be found in the February 2015 issue, which is also issue 400 of Energy Economist. Global crude oil production has only fallen in six years since 1984 and then generally as a result of geopolitical disruptions to supply or restraint by OPEC, rather than as a reaction to price. This is because the conventional oil industry […]

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