Category: Peak Oil

Printer-friendly by Gail Tverberg , originally published by Our Finite World  | TODAY The world is in a dangerous place now. A large share of oil sellers need the revenue from oil sales. They have to continue producing, regardless of how low oil prices go unless they are stopped by bankruptcy, revolution, or something else that gives them a very clear signal to stop. Producers of oil from US shale are in this category, as are most oil exporters, including many of the OPEC countries and Russia. Some large oil companies, such as Shell and ExxonMobil, decided even before the recent drop in prices that they couldn’t make money by developing available producible resources at then-available prices, likely around $100 barrel. See my post, Beginning of the End? Oil Companies Cut Back on Spending . These large companies are in the process of trying to sell off acreage, if […]

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4689 Votes James Schlesinger said once that humans have only two modes of operation: complacency and panic. This bimodal kind of functioning seems to be applied also to the oil market, where everything is judged on the base of a simple binary rule: high prices: bad; low prices: good. So, with oil prices falling rapidly during the past few days, the general attitude seems to be mostly of rejoicing. All worries about peak oil are being swept under the carpet and SUV owners seem to be happily expecting the fall of gas prices that will allow them to fill up their tanks on the cheap. Unfortunately, the bimodal perception of the world makes people blind to the fact that nothing happens in isolation in the world. It is the basic law of complex systems: you can’t do just one thing. If something changes in a complex system, it is […]

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Resilience Published on Resilience (http://www.resilience.org) Original article: http://www.postcarbon.org/how-to-shrink-the-economy-without-crashing-it-a-ten-point-plan/ by Richard Heinberg Earth image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission. The human economy is currently too big to be sustainable. We know this because Global Footprint Network, which methodically tracks the relevant data, informs us that humanity is now using 1.5 Earths’ worth of resources . We can temporarily use resources faster than Earth regenerates them only by borrowing from the future productivity of the planet, leaving less for our descendants. But we cannot do this for long. One way or another, the economy (and here we are talking mostly about the economies of industrial nations) must shrink until it subsists on what Earth can provide long-term. Saying “one way or another” implies that this process can occur either advertently or inadvertently: that is, if we do not shrink the economy deliberately, it will contract of its own accord […]

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The oil field which helped kick-start the North Sea oil boom in the 1970s now looks set to be approaching the end of its useful life.  Anglo-Dutch energy company, Royal Dutch Shell, has announced that it will close two of its three remaining platforms this weekend, while the third will be decommissioned in the near future. It raises questions as to the future for Britain’s energy dependencies and whether North Sea oil and gas are now things of the past. VoR’s Tim Walklate has more. The multi-national oil and gas company also said that the remaining platform, Brent Charlie, would follow suit “in the next few years.” In late 2011 another platform, Brent Delta, was the first to be decommissioned and this marked the beginning of the retirement of the giant oilfield. Shell said in a statement that “from a technically innovative installation phase through to a long period of […]

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Printer-friendly by Kurt Cobb , originally published by Resource Insights  | TODAY Back in March 1999 "The Economist" magazine carried a  cover photo  of two men drenched in oil as they attempted to close a faulty valve that was spraying a huge stream of crude skyward. Over the photo was the headline: "Drowning in oil." At the time it really did seem as if the world were drowning in oil. The previous December  crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange touched $10.72 per barrel . That month  U.S. gasoline prices averaged 95 cents per gallon . "The Economist" opined that  oil might go down to $5 per barrel . But, of course, in retrospect the magazine’s cover proved to be the perfect contrarian indicator, for oil had already begun its historic ascent toward $147 per barrel. The 2008 price spike was the culmination of a 10-year bull market […]

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4688 Votes The media is full of peak oil refutations. Unfortunately for the pundits, while they’re heavy on rhetoric they tend to be short on data. In comparison, way back in 2009, Praveen Ghunta, used the BP Statistical Review of World Energy to make a list of countries past peak oil on his True Cost blog . He updated the data again in 2011 . Taking Ghunta’s work as a base I have followed up with figures from the 2014 BP Statistical Review of World Energy . I have purposefully been much more conservative in in defining what a country past peak actually looks like: I have made the arbitrary decision that any country or region that peaked more than 10 years ago and produced a minimum of 10% less oil in 2013 than in the peak year has officially reached peak oil. That is of course is the […]

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4666 Votes By Drs. Robert & Sonia Vogl President and Vice President, Illinois Renewable Energy Association Our economy was built on cheap fossil fuels, which supported our economic and technological progress. As sources of conventional low-cost oil are depleted, we have turned to unconventional sources with higher extraction costs. With current oil prices around $80 to $85 per barrel, it has been estimated that new tar sands oil requires $95 per barrel to be extracted. If the oil is not extracted, prices could still rise, as competition for the existing oil would intensify. Energy economist Douglas Reynolds believes our economic malaise is a result of a decrease in energy supplies. He notes that the United States has a vast global military presence that we are unable to pay for, a decreasing standard of living, increased concentration of wealth, and a continuous energy crisis that began in 1973. He sees […]

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David Hughes, a Canadian geoscientist and a fellow of the anti-fracking Post Carbon Institute , has emerged as one of the media’s favorite proponents of “Peak Oil,” the debunked theory that oil production will soon be in permanent decline. Never mind, of course, that there are more proven oil reserves today than there were decades ago, when “Peak Oil” advocates were saying the exact same thing as they are today. In a new report , Hughes once again gives succor to anti-development and anti-fracking activists with more claims that shale development will “peak” a lot earlier than expected. More specifically, Hughes claims that “tight oil production from major plays will peak before 2020”. He also adds: “…by 2040, production rates from the Bakken and Eagle Ford will be less than a tenth of that projected by the EIA.” Hughes is arguing, in effect, that the hundreds of thousands of […]

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Printer-friendly The world price of oil – Brent Crude – fell below $84 per barrel on October 15.  This was 26% less than the $115 it had reached in June, just four months before.  The rise during the spring had many explanations:  global tensions in Ukraine, the South China Sea and especially the Middle East with the emergence of the Islamic State, plus a capital crunch challenging the health of the U.S. shale fracking boom.  Then suddenly in June, prices started dropping, reaching levels unseen since 2010 (though still high by historical standards – twice that of 10 years ago). What is going on?  Why does the price of oil matter to financial advisors?  What might these fluctuations mean to the price and supply of oil for the rest of the decade?  Isn’t oil just another commodity? A primer on oil prices Oil is unique. There is a tight […]

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