Peak oil – Nov 13

November 12, 2005

Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage



ASPO-USA Denver conference report (Friday)

Stuart Staniford, The Oil Drum
Here’s my report on the second day of the ASPO-USA conference, which was absolutely superb – even better than the first day.

Note that you can also get the slides from ASPO-USA’s website. Also, see my report of the first day.

John Hickenlooper:
The day kicked off with an address from the Mayor of Denver, John Hickenlooper, who has joined that brave but small band of honest and courageous politicians willing to go anywhere near the issue of peak oil. Indeed his office is a co-organizer of the conference. Hickenlooper began his professional life as an exploration geologist with Buckhorn Petroleum in the Rockies. After five years, he was laid off in the industry downturn in the 1980s, and he ended up starting a brewpub in Denver. One thing led to another and now he’s mayor.

He doesn’t think the sky is falling due to Peak Oil, but he believes it’s something that we need to be aware of and be thinking about. “Over the next ten or twenty years it’s going to play a powerful role”. But he believes in relatively painless adaptation – there will be a plateau and then gradual decline, and there is “abundant time” to make the changes that need to be made. Precisely because oil has been so cheap, there are lots of low hanging fruit in conservation to find.

Under his leadership, Denver is studying city oil use and what would happen at varying levels of oil price – how would the city adapt. [Much more at original article.
(12 November 2005)
Outstanding coverage of the ASPO-USA conference in Denver. Why isn’t the mainstream media doing this? Related story in the Durango Herald: Experts in Denver debate issue of ‘Peak Oil’ at conference. -BA


The peak oil crisis: importing energy

Tom Whipple, Falls Church News-Press
In a perfect world, the US Congress would have recognized decades ago that one day the world would run short of oil and would have initiated programs to mitigate the consequences. The initial steps are obvious: start a major conservation program and start moving the nation as quickly as possible to alternative sources of renewable energy— wind, solar, biomass, and waves. Along the way it might be nice to prepare for rationing, and the considerable social and economic distress that will ensue when oil depletion sets in, but conservation and alternatives would be a good start.

Democracies, however, simply don’t work that way. It is very nearly impossible to convince people and their elected representatives something very bad is about to happen until it actually does. The New Orleans flood is a perfect example of this reluctance to recognize and deal with looming disasters.

Peak oil, therefore, is yet another example of denial with potentially much more serious consequences. Nearly every unbiased observer who has looked seriously at the issue comes to the conclusion world oil production will peak within ten years— tops. Nearly everybody who has seriously studied what we can do about it is saying it will take 10 to 20 years to develop significant alternatives to our voracious use of oil- and gas-based liquid fuels.

To effect a policy change in America of the magnitude needed to deal with peak oil, a critical mass of administration officials, industry leaders, members of Congress, opinion makers, and just plain citizens will need to form before serious Congressional action occurs. How long, and what it will take to induce this critical mass to form is one of the more interesting questions surrounding the advent of peak oil.
(10-16 November 2005)


Sebastopol town hall meeting with Richard Heinberg
(AUDIO)
Global Public Media
Richard Heinberg gives a peak oil presentation and takes questions at a town hall meeting in Sebastopol, CA. Afterwards community members offer suggestions for making Sebastopol more self sufficient and sustainable.
(11 November 2005)


Interview with Alan Falleri, Willits city planner
(AUDIO)
Global Public Media
Alan Falleri, city planner and Community Development Director for the city of Willits, CA, talks to David Room of Global Public Media about city planning challenges when preparing for peak oil.
(11 November 2005)


Rep. Bartlett says country is addicted to oil

Karen Hanna, Herald-Mail
After a century that saw enormous increases in creature comforts and world population, the age of oil is ending, U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett told members of the Keedysville Ruritan Club on Tuesday.

“We are just as hooked on fossil fuels as a cocaine addict is hooked on his cocaine, and we will be weaned from it,” Bartlett said before the Ruritan’s business meeting.

Bartlett, R-Md., told about 25 people that the country must invest in energy alternatives and maintain its heritage of respect for God and civil liberties to preserve its greatness.

…Bartlett told one Ruritan who asked he believed education is important in getting people to conserve gas by taking such measures as driving more slowly. The country’s lifestyle, which currently depends on oil, is unsustainable, Bartlett said. He cited research and estimates showing oil production has hit its peak.

Bartlett pledged to vote against a bill that comes before the House of Representatives on Thursday if it includes a provision allowing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The decision won’t reflect his environmental beliefs, though, Bartlett said. He said he plans to take that stance because he believes the nation should hold back on using the oil it has left.

“This may be a rainy day. There will be a rainier day,” Bartlett said.

The country should return to the type of mass-conservation efforts it adopted during World War II and approach the development of new energy sources with the “urgency of the Manhattan Project,” Bartlett said.
(11 November 2005)


Kuwait’s biggest field starts to run out of oil

AME Info (Middle East Finance and Economy)
It was an incredible revelation last week that the second largest oil field in the world is exhausted and past its peak output. Yet that is what the Kuwait Oil Company revealed about its Burgan field.

The peak output of the Burgan oil field will now be around 1.7 million barrels per day, and not the two million barrels per day forecast for the rest of the field’s 30 to 40 years of life, Chairman Farouk Al Zanki told Bloomberg.
(12 November 2005)


Kuwait’s Burgan oil field, world’s 2nd largest, is `exhausted’

James Cordahi and Andy Critchlow, Bloomberg via The Oil Drum
Kuwaiti oil production from the world’s second-largest field is “exhausted” and falling after almost six decades of pumping, forcing the government to increase spending on new deposits, the chairman of the state oil company said.

The plateau in output from the Burgan field will be about 1.7 million barrels a day, rather than as much as the 2 million a day that engineers had forecast could be maintained for the rest of the field’s 30 to 40 years of life, said Farouk al-Zanki, chairman of state-owned Kuwait Oil Co. Kuwait plans to spend about $3 billion annually for the next three years to expand output and exports, three times the recent average.
(9 November 2005)
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Tags: Energy Policy, Fossil Fuels, Oil