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World ‘cannot meet oil demand’
Carl Mortished, UK TImes
THE world lacks the means to produce enough oil to meet rising projections of demand for fuel over the next decade, according to Christophe de Margerie, head of exploration for Total and heir presumptive to the leadership of the French energy multinational.
The world is mistakenly focusing on oil reserves when the problem is capacity to produce oil, M de Margerie said in an interview with The Times. Forecasters, such as the International Energy Agency (IEA), have failed to consider the speed at which new resources can be brought into production, he believes.
“Numbers like 120 million barrels per day will never be reached, never,” he said.
The IEA predicted in its World Energy Outlook that global demand for crude oil would reach 121 million barrels per day by 2030, of which more than half would be supplied by Opec. The agency predicted that more than $3 trillion (£1.72 trillion) of investment in wells, pipelines and refineries would be needed to raise output to such levels.
(8 April 2006)
OPEC warns high commodity prices may kill oil projects
Selina Williams and Sally Jones, Schlumberger
PARIS – Soaring commodity and raw material prices are increasing the cost of oil and gas projects by up to three times, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries ministers said Friday.
Although current high oil prices may be helping to drive much-needed crude investment, the rising cost of construction projects could curtail new energy production development, they warn.
Addressing delegates at Petrostrategies annual oil summit in Paris, Qatari Oil Minister Abdullah al Attiyah said: “Our costs have tripled from two years ago, due to high (commodity) prices. And its not just that, it is also contractors who have tripled their prices.”
(7 April 2006)
New ASPO-USA newsletter
Tom Whipple(editor), ASPOP-USA
Contents of April 10 issue:
1. The outlook for summer gas prices
2. Middle East
3. Nigerian troubles continue
4. Hurricane predictions
5. Energy Briefs
Commentary: Alaskan oil: The Paradigm of Non-OPEC Oil
As of January 2006, ASPO-USA is offering a free short publication that provides time-short individuals with a quick overview of issues and events that are the building blocks of the larger peak oil story.
The Peak Oil Review is intended to be an “executive summary” of weekly news. It will typically contain two parts: a page of news briefs plus a commentary written by either an ASPO-USA regular or a guest analyst. The news summaries will highlight price trends, depletion numbers, threats to supply, new supply completions, substitute fuel issues, new analysis and reports, and more–all from a peak-oil perspective.
The Peak Oil Review will be circulated via email to all who would like to subscribe. To sign up for the Peak Oil Review send an email to peakoilreview@aspo-usa.com .
Please note that ASPO-USA and this publication are strictly non-partisan. Indeed, mitigating the looming story of depleting petroleum resources will require intelligent bipartisan action by elected officials as well as the private sector.
The editors and publishers of this Review are motivated by the expectation that world-wide production of petroleum liquids is likely to peak between now and 2015. The facts convince us that current trends aren’t sustainable. We hope that those who can initiate change, especially at the community level and higher, will do so armed with a broad awareness of key trends. The Peak Oil Review intends to contribute to that awareness.
(10 April 2006)
Toward a new vision for Hamilton
Ryan McGreal, Raise the Hammer
No wonder city staff don’t know what to do with Richard Gilbert’s peak oil report; adopting it would mean throwing out most of Hamilton’s long-term growth strategy.
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(This is part one of a two-part series on Richard Gilbert’s vision for Hamilton. Part one looks at the implications of peak oil and peak natural gas for Hamilton’s growth strategy. Part two will discuss transportation, goods movement, and building energy use in more detail, focusing on Hamilton’s opportunities in energy production and conservation.)
In gambling, continuing a losing strategy because you don’t want to forfeit what you’ve already wasted is called “chasing your losses”. I see a parallel in the city’s ongoing denial of how climate change and declining oil production are going to grind Hamilton’s long-term growth strategy to a halt.
Last June, City Council voted to hire an energy policy expert to assess Hamilton’s plans for aerotropolis, public transit, city fleet, and goods movement in the event of rising energy costs. The job went to Richard Gilbert, the research director at the Centre for Sustainable Transportation and a transport consultant to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Gilbert delivered the report to city staff last fall, but they have refused to share it with City Council, indicating that they had asked Gilbert to make some changes to the report before finalizing it. According to Gilbert, it should be released some time this month.
Last summer, I had the pleasure of meeting with Gilbert to discuss his ideas about peak oil, peak natural gas, and ways that Hamilton might thrive in what he calls the “energy-constrained world” we face.
(9 April 2006)
Energy philosophy for entropic times
Andrew McKillop, Raise the Hammer
Change has to come and will come. Peak Oil means we are going somewhere else where we could or might do better.
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If we are looking for an energy philosophy that might help us in troubled times, we can try out the multiple and disputed meanings of entropy.
Warning: This has been tried before by many persons from many different angles. Some even jumped the gun, long ago, by disputing exactly how to state the Entropy Law, as it is called, while others rightly argued it is is fact a principle.
Finally it was settled and set down, but never to the agreement of all players. Those players were 19th Century, mostly European scientists of all types – engineers, mechanical scientists, astronomers, mathematicians and even politicians, like Sadi Carnot. Later on, all kinds of philosophers, historians, writers, journalists and more politicians joined the party.
As a consequence, nobody today knows exactly what the Entropy Law (or principle) really means, but it seems to have a dark side and could imply that chaos rules.
…Yet another lesson of entropy ‘law’ is the age-old principle of Moderation. This can’t be dated, but it is really old stuff, perhaps from about 3000 BC and the Apollon cult, so hysterically put down by Judaic, Christian and Islamic philosophers.
The Stoicians, Epicureans, and Cynics also believed in moderation with a big M. The best way to understand this principle is to ask how an average-intelligence parrot or squirrel, or whale or any non-human living thing would reply to the question: Should we maximise our dependence on a depleting resource of fossil energy, and irrevocably change the world’s climate for hundreds, or thousands of years ahead by simply burning it?.
They would politely decline any thought of a thing so stupid, yet Nobel prizewinning economists tell us it is the best and only thing to do! You note the logic fault: if it is the only thing to do there is no need to ask if it is the best.
To find out what is best you need choices. We badly need choices.
RtH Editor’s Note: This essay was prepared for the New York City Peak Oil Conference, April 2006.
(9 April 2006)
Also posted at Counter Currents.
The Darwin Award for self-extinction goes to:
Bill Henderson, Countercurrents.org
When a young Edwin Hubble started looking out into the universe at the beginning of the 20th century experts thought that this universe was only tens or maybe hundreds of millions years old (most people thought the world was less than 10,000 years old). Now, on a 4 1/2 billion year old Earth in a 13 billion year old universe, the odds against the end of the world today or tomorrow are astronomical. (Unless you belong to a willfully ignorant cult like the President.)
But don’t make fun of the end of the world catastrophists . And don’t be overly optimistic about the resilience and adaptability of our civilization, profoundly misunderstanding the challenge facing us today.
In man’s long history – ten thousand years since the innovation of agriculture and civilization; seventy thousand years since the bottleneck where geneticists have determined that only around ten thousand humans out of a global population of tens of millions survived a ‘volcanic winter’; and back at least hundreds of thousands of years to taming fire, learning language and the dawn of religion and culture – it has been only in the last century that we have had the ability to alter the surface of the Earth so that human life was in jeopardy.
Twice (at least) in the past century we have created a possibility of our own accidental extinction: nuclear winter and depletion of the ozone layer.
…Matt Simmons re-thirty years on evaluation of Limits to Growth is relevant. William Catton Jr’s OVERSHOOT has been reborn on the net because the relevant catastrophe graph isn’t Hubbert’s Curve but that graph we all know where human population bumps along the bottom of the graph for millennia before spiking exponentially beginning in the 16 century with the use of fossil fuel. Catton views us as a species needing, using, and dissipating energy, as a species that should be concerned by a tendency for animal populations to rise exponentially, overshoot and crash. What goes exponentially up promises to go exponentially down.
Exponential growth on a finite planet has consequences.
(10 April 2006)
