Peak oil, prices, and supplies – July 9

July 9, 2010

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

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage


Climate photo of the week: BP oil spill

Gary Braasch, World View of Global Warming
The Battle of BP — Oil Disaster continues to spread from the runaway well.

The BP oil spill is now into its third month with no end in sight. On July 3 Gary Braasch and Joan Rothlein flew to the site of the doomed Deepwater Horizon well with Southwings pilot Tom Hutchings. For miles the Gulf is shiny with oil, with long streamers of thicker red oil. The drill location, which pilots and others now call “The Source,” gives the jarring impression of a naval battle, with the two huge flames of gas and crude and all the attendant vessels. With strong east winds and currents, the oil that is not being just burned off by the Q4000 (on left with flames) or captured and separated from methane by the Discoverer Enterprise (burning methane on right) wells up and is carried toward the coast…
(8 July 2010)
The photo referred to can be seen on the World View of Global Warning website along with others that Gary has taken recently -KS.


Canada: The Saudi Arabia of the North?

Andrew Nikiforuk, The Mark
Canada’s road to becoming a petro-state is lined with lies, greed, and pollution.

Canada now suffers from an advanced state of “petromania,” a condition of rank moral dishonesty compounded by visions of oily grandeur.

When a nation becomes the number one supplier of petroleum to the United States as well as a gleeful addict of its associated trade revenue ($40 billion), it can’t do so without carbonizing its political and economic character.

According to Stanford political scientist Terry Karl any country that relies on “an unsustainable development trajectory” for oil routinely degenerates into a petro-state defined by cancerous networks of complicity between public sector and private oil companies. We’re now living that peril with the tar sands.

The resource curse, a topic verboten in the national media, probably explains why Canada’s Environment Minister Jim Prentice and the Alberta government, a northern Saudi kingdom, have become gleeful marketing representatives for the world’s riskiest energy project.
(7 July 2010)


The Gulf Spill – The Battle over the Drilling Moratorium

Erna Buffie, Suite 101
Why the July 8 court decision marks the most important win in the oil industry’s battle against the drilling moratorium.

Despite the fact that Shell and Exxon criticized BP’s safety procedures in congressional hearings on the Gulf Spill, the industry closed ranks to battle Obama’s six-month deepwater drilling moratorium. The question is: why?

The Gulf Spill – The Oil Industry Battle Against the Drilling Moratorium
On Thursday, July 8, lawyers for the Obama administration appeared before a panel of three judges in a Louisiana courtroom to appeal the June 22 court ban of its six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. Its request was rejected in a unanimous decision…
(9 July 2010)


Tags: Consumption & Demand, Deepwater Oil, Energy Policy, Fossil Fuels, Industry, Media & Communications, Oil