Category: Peak Oil

While the world starts to understand that behind the evil behind ISIS there is also another element to it, greed. US airstrikes hit mobile oil refineries in Syria that was help fund the terrorist group. Ideology is always best suited when it is being funded with oil and to strike at these mobile units is a step in destroying this ISIS terror threat. That was clear that when they were fighting over the Brega refinery in Iraq they went to great measures to kill people but save the refinery. While the Brent Crude fell hard against the WTI as Libyan oil comes back on line a late surge led by RBOB gasoline as refinery glitches and a larger than expected drop in US crude supply brought the market back. Yet with a soaring dollar it is hard to be too excited about the long side of almost any commodity. […]

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Due to the highest level of domestic crude oil production in 45 years, oil imports will make up less than a quarter of U.S. consumption next year, according to a forecast by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). In August, “total U.S. crude oil production averaged an estimated 8.6 million barrels per day,” which was “the highest monthly production since July 1986,” according to EIA’s “ Short Term Outlook ,” which was released September 9th. EIA expects domestic oil production to increase to an average 9.5 million barrels per day in 2015, which would be the highest level since before the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) oil embargo in 1973. At that time, the federal government placed a ban on exporting U.S.-produced oil abroad. “If achieved, the 2015 forecast would be the highest annual average crude oil production since 1970,” the EIA forecast stated. As a result, U.S. […]

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David Archibald has recently revised his peak date for shale oil. The below was contained in a recent post I received from him: Ron, For what it is worth, just to let you know that I have recanted on my estimate of US LTO production. This is from reading the presentations put out in September by the US independents.   I started with the EOG presentation and then worked through the others that EOG referred to.  If Hubbert-type analysis works for LTO, it may be too early to apply it. The rig count for the Bakken etc may be down to flat but the fraccing units are pumping a lot more sand and the economics of fraccing have improved a lot over the last two years.  That in turn means that the resource is larger at a given IRR cutoff.  This is currently my best guess of the three major […]

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Oil and other commodity prices have recently been dropping. Is this good news, or bad? Figure 1. Trend in Commodity Prices since January 2011. Brent spot oil price from EIA; Australian Coal from World Bank Prink Sheet; Food from UN’s FAO. I would argue that falling commodity prices are bad news . It likely means that the debt bubble which has been holding up the world economy for a very long–since World War II, at least–is failing to expand sufficiently. If the debt bubble collapses, we will be in huge difficulty. Many people have the impression that falling oil prices mean that the cost of production is falling, and thus that the feared “peak oil” is far in the distance. This is not the correct interpretation, especially when many types of commodities are decreasing in price at the same time. When prices are set in a world market, the […]

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In a New York Times op-ed published September 18 titled “ Errors and Emissions ,” economist-columnist Paul Krugman took a swipe at my organization, Post Carbon Institute, lumping us together with the Koch brothers as purveyors of “climate despair.” No, the Koch brothers are not in despair about the climate; apparently our shared error is that we say fighting climate change and growing the economy are incompatible. And, according to Krugman, a new report from the New Climate Economy Project (NCEP) and a working paper from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) show that the falling cost of renewable energy means this is happily not the case. But in our view Krugman himself is guilty of five critical errors, and three equally serious omissions. First the errors: 1. He mistakes post-growth realism for anti-growth activism. While Krugman linked to my book The End of Growth , it seems he may […]

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The Greatest Peak Oil Novel Ever Written Herman Melville never mentioned “peak whale oil” in his “Moby Dick”, published in 1851. But the novel can be understood taking into account the fact that the American whaling industry was going through its production peak just during those years. We may consider “Moby Dick” as the greatest peak oil novel ever written. In 1970, the United States went through their production peak for crude oil. Production reached a maximum then started a decline that has been lasting up to a few years ago. The peak was an epochal event, it was the “ great U-turn ” of the American economy, which ushered in a new era of larger social inequality and diffuse poverty. But the reaction to the peak itself was a deafening silence. Earlier on, the peak had been discussed and extensively debated since the time when, in 1956, the […]

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Probably the most important thing you need to know about the 1972 book entitled Limits to Growth is that it makes no predictions. Rather, the much maligned study provides scenarios for thinking about the future of resource use, pollution, population, food, and industrial production.  Limits to Growth detailed three scenarios originally, one of them called business-as-usual or BAU. Since then, countless scenarios have been run using the same model–called World3–and some of them are discussed in updates to the book, the most recent published in 2004. Many of the scenarios including BAU result in a collapse of industrial production and population some time this century. What has surprised those reviewing the model used by Limits to Growth researchers is how closely reality has tracked the original BAU scenario. A recent review suggests that the signs of societal collapse may be around the corner based on the observed trends. But […]

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By | Sun, 07 September 2014 00:00 | Perhaps you’ve seen one of the recent barrage of articles claiming that fears of an imminent peak and decline in world oil production have either been dispelled (because we actually have plenty of oil) or are misplaced (because climate change is the only environmental problem we should be concerned with). I’m not buying either argument. Why? Let’s start with the common assertion that oil supplies are sufficiently abundant so that a peak in production is many years or decades away. Everyone agrees that planet Earth still holds plenty of petroleum or petroleum-like resources: that’s the kernel of truth at the heart of most attempted peak-oil debunkery. However, extracting and delivering those resources at an affordable price is becoming a bigger challenge year by year. For the oil industry, costs of production have rocketed; they’re currently soaring at a rate of about […]

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Peak oil and peak coal: When will we run out of resources [infographic] Many people are pointing to society reaching its peak point for mining resources, but when will we actually run out? One person on Reddit, known as CrazyHors3 , has done the math in this infographic.

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Pumpjacks image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission. Perhaps you’ve seen one of the recent barrage of articles claiming that fears of an imminent peak and decline in world oil production have either been dispelled (because we actually have plenty of oil) or are misplaced (because climate change is the only environmental problem we should be concerned with). I’m not buying either argument. Why? Let’s start with the common assertion that oil supplies are sufficiently abundant so that a peak in production is many years or decades away. Everyone agrees that planet Earth still holds plenty of petroleum or petroleum-like resources: that’s the kernel of truth at the heart of most attempted peak-oil debunkery. However, extracting and delivering those resources at an affordable price is becoming a bigger challenge year by year. For the oil industry, costs of production have rocketed; they’re currently soaring at a rate of […]

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