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Hurricane Dean to Make Landfall in Mexico Today: Cantarell Now Directly in Dean’s Sights
Khebab, The Oil Drum
This is an update from yesterday’s post. Hurricane Dean became a Category 5 storm last night with winds reaching 165 mph and reaching a low pressure of 909 mb (as of 2:15a EDT; Katrina was 920 mb and Camille 909 mb):
TOD Editor PG writes:
If the current forecast holds we could be talking about around 2.5 million barrels per day of Mexico’s supply capacity being shut in for a while, and some of that shut in for an extended amount of time. Around 1.5 mbpd of that is exported to the US (of the 21 mbpd the US uses, and the 85mbpd the world uses, each day).
(20 August 2007)
Hurricane Dean’s Impact on Oil Infrastructure
Khebab, The Oil Drum
This post is a collection of different Google Earth based mashups of various weather data, oil infrastructure overlays and excellent impact maps established by Chuck Watson (see also PG’s post for a list of resources on Mexico oil infrastructure). The list of Google Earth files (kml/kmz files) used in this post can be find on my blog. There is now a good likelihood that Dean will impact significantly the Cantarell and the KMZ oil complex which constitute the backbone of the Mexican production.
(20 August 2007)
Hurricane Dean Update: Here’s What We Know about Mexico’s Oil and Gas Infrastructure and Supply
Prof. Goose, The Oil Drum
We know that many of the models have Dean going into the Bay of Campeche. But what does that mean for supply and production?
Well, if the current forecast holds we could be talking about around a million barrels per day of supply capacity being shut in for some extended amount of time. Can that matter when the US consumes about 21 million barrels per day (and the world consumes 85 mbpd)? Um, yes, especially when there isn’t “slack” supply to be brought to market.
The markets aren’t reacting yet. Do they know something we don’t know? Maybe. But what do we actually know about Mexico and its supply and infrastructure?
Under the fold (click “there’s more” below), I am going to try to bring together some of our information we have gleaned to this point. I also encourage you to deliver news tips, forecasts, insights, and other links in the comment thread below.
(19 August 2007)
Open letter to Duncan Clarke
David Strahan, blog
Dear Duncan,
I suppose advocates of peak oil should be flattered that they are now taken seriously enough for someone to launch such a laboriously researched attack as The Battle for Barrels: Peak Oil Myths & World Oil Futures. The idea that global oil production will soon ‘peak’ and go into terminal decline, with potentially catastrophic results for the world’s economy, has struggled to gain significant traction in the mainstream policy debate, but you are clearly alarmed at its progress. If we are to believe your book, what you characterise as the peak oil “movement” is evidently doing something right.
Peak oil forecasters should welcome the attention, and not simply because it publicises their work; you have correctly identified some obvious weaknesses. Unfortunately your analysis is undermined by factual errors, out-of-date or partial reporting of oil depletion models, a failure to examine the planks in your own eyes and – in contrast to your self-professed industry expertise – an extraordinary blindness to the significance of key events in the real oil world. All of which prevents you from tackling the bigger question raised by your critique, which is how much difference does this all make to the peak oil argument? And the answer, after all the huffing and puffing, is surprisingly little.
(15 August 2007)
David Strahan is an author and journalist who has written extensively about peak oil. His most recent book is “The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man.”
The new dirty energy
Drake Bennett, Boston Globe
It’s big, it’s growing — and it’s bad for the environment. Inside the other alternative-energy movement.
—
FOR THOSE WHO dream that high oil prices will help drive America toward a brave new world of clean energy, the MacKay River project in Alberta, Canada, offers a glimpse of the future.
…The thick, tarry petroleum that the Alberta project pulls from beneath that forest is far dirtier than oil.
Alternative energy wasn’t supposed to look like this. For years, leading environmental thinkers have argued that high fossil fuel prices are good for the planet, driving investors and customers toward biofuels, solar power, and a host of new energy sources that will quickly become cost-effective.
But as oil prices stay high, the real beneficiary often turns out to be a very different alternative-energy industry, one focused on dirty fuel sources such as oil sands, oil shale, and coal. Environmentally speaking, the oil-sand plants of Alberta are no better than petroleum drilling, and in some ways decidedly worse. In North America, in terms of energy output, this so-called “unconventional oil” sector already dwarfs clean and renewable-energy technologies, and is poised to grow even faster in the next decade.
“To assume that high energy prices mean we’ll switch to wind or solar or other renewables is simply unrealistic,” says Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy expert at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. “It only means that if we make that a concerted policy.”
(19 August 2007)
Recommended by David Roberts at Gristmill who emphasizes that “sustainability is a choice.”
Peak Oil Digest ending 16th August 2007
Dr Mike Haywood, Groundswell Cornwall
This weekly digest is a prioritised list of links to newly published internet pages relating to Peak oil/energy security and the global economic situation.
(About 100 articles)
(August 2007)
Another peak oil aggregator emerges. It would be wonderful if we could co-operate in some fashion so we aren’t duplicating each other’s work.
Groundswell is a peak oil group in Cornwall, England. -BA
