Category: Peak Oil

4721 Votes The peak oil theater I am a little late for the talk at the peak oil conference. Fortunately, it seems that I didn’t lose much: the speaker must have started just a few minutes before I arrived and I only missed the introduction by the chairman. So, I relax in my seat as the speaker goes on with his presentation.(*) The first thing I note is his the way he is dressed; not the standard one in this conference. Most speakers, so far, have been physicists and they have a typical way of dressing: they look like physicists even when they wear a tie; and they usually don’t. This speaker, instead, not only wears a tie, but even wears a double breasted suit (or so it seems to me – even if it is not a double-breasted suit, he wears it as if it were one). And […]

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4721 Votes T he mentally-challenged kibitzers “out there” — in the hills and hollows of the commentary universe, cable news, the blogosphere, and the pathetic vestige of newspaperdom — are all jumping up and down in a rapture over cheap gasoline prices. Overlay on this picture the fairy tale of coming US energy independence, stir in the approach of winter in the North Dakota shale oil fields, put an early November polar vortex cherry on top, and you have quite a recipe for smashed expectations. Plummeting oil prices are a symptom of terrible mounting instabilities in the world. After years of stagnation, complacency, and official pretense, the linked matrix of systems we depend on for running our techno-industrial society is shaking itself to pieces. American officials either don’t understand what they’re seeing, or don’t want you to know what they see. The tensions between energy, money, and economy have […]

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4719 Votes [ This is a complex question, because the quality of the oil matters.  We’ve gotten the good stuff, the light, easy oil. Much of the remaining oil is deep, nasty-gunky stuff, in arctic and other remote areas, and will take a lot more energy to produce and refine ] Ron Patterson. July 14, 2014. World Crude Oil Production by Geographical Area . Peakoilbarrel.com Check out the graph “World Less North America” at Peak Oil Barrel which shows world oil production minus North American production is down by 2 million barrels.  Are we starting to see the petticoats of the net energy cliff?  As David Hughes wrote in Drilling Deeper. A reality check on U.S. government forecasts for a lasting tight oil & Shale gas boom , both peak tight (fracked) oil and gas are likely to happen before 2020 in North America.  Powers has also documented this […]

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A worker descends an access ladder outside an oil storage tank at the custody transfer facility in the Salym Petroleum Development oil fields near the Bazhenov shale formation in Salym, Russia, on Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2014. Salym Petroleum Development, the venture between Shell and Gazprom Neft, has started drilling the first of five horizontal wells over the next two years that will employ multi-fracturing technology, according to a statement today. Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg ©Bloomberg Not much is heard these days of “ peak oil ”. This is the argument, widely advanced less than 10 years ago, that the world had already passed the peak of sustainable oil production and that new discoveries – which would increasingly be small and incremental – could at best only slow the rate of decline. As supply continued its seemingly inexorable decline, demand was growing strongly, especially in developing countries. Between 2001 and 2007, […]

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4711 Votes The International Energy Agency (IEA) is the energy watchdog of the industrial world. The developed nations of the world were caught off guard by the oil crisis of 1973. They then realized energy resources are so fundamental to all of civilization, and recognized how vulnerable we are to supply disruptions. Forty years ago in 1974, the International Energy Agency was formed, tasked with keeping an eye on these precious resources, and providing policy makers around the world with information to make better informed planning decisions. The primary deliverable from the IEA is the massive World Energy Outlook (WEO) report that is released annually in November. Concerned about peak oil, I began reading the Executive Summary to this report 10 years ago. Five years ago I wrote a summary of what the report has been telling us from 2005 – 2009, concerning issues related to peak oil: The […]

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Printer-friendly The International Energy Agency (IEA) is the energy watchdog of the industrial world. The developed nations of the world were caught off guard by the oil crisis of 1973. They then realized energy resources are so fundamental to all of civilization, and recognized how vulnerable we are to supply disruptions. Forty years ago in 1974, the International Energy Agency was formed, tasked with keeping an eye on these precious resources, and providing policy makers around the world with information to make better informed planning decisions. The primary deliverable from the IEA is the massive World Energy Outlook (WEO) report that is released annually in November. Concerned about peak oil, I began reading the Executive Summary to this report 10 years ago. Five years ago I wrote a summary of what the report has been telling us from 2005 – 2009, concerning issues related to peak oil: The IEA […]

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John Kemp is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own LONDON, Nov 12 (Reuters) – There has always been a close link between U.S. oil production, international prices and OPEC, so it should come as no surprise that North America’s shale drillers find themselves locked in a battle with Saudi Arabia over prices and market share. Until the 1950s, the United States accounted for more than half of all global oil production. Big finds such as Oklahoma’s Glenn Pool (1905) and the East Texas field (1930) drove oil price changes around the rest of the world. Since the 1970s, the United States has been a net importer, and international prices have tended to drive changes in U.S. exploration and production. Drilling and output in major oil-producing states have been closely correlated with the rise and fall in real oil prices. And nowhere has the relationship been […]

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4708 Votes We would do well to pause, and ponder both the data and implications presented in the Post Carbon Institute’s latest report , released a few days before Halloween, “Drilling Deeper: A Reality Check On U.S. Government Forecasts for a Lasting Tight Oil & Shale Gas Boom” . The PCI’s new report exposes current oil industry & Energy Department oil production forecasts as wildly exaggerated. Further, it makes a compelling case that production of “U.S. shale gas and tight oil reserves will peak and drop off swiftly, long before officially predicted by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.” The report was written by PCI Fellow and geoscientist David Hughes, who previously predicted the vast downgrade of available oil resources in California’s Monterey Shale. According to PCI Executive Director Asher Miller, “based on our analysis, the reality is far different from what the industry is telling the Energy Department, and […]

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