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Peak Oil and Beyond – Q&A with Heinberg, Campbell and Leggett – Part 1.
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
At January’s Soil Association conference “One Planet Agriculture”, I chaired a session called “Peak Oil And Beyond – a Discussion Circle”, which gave delegates the opportunity to question Richard Heinberg and Colin Campbell, and later Jeremy Leggett, about peak oil and related issues. The session ran for over an hour, so rather than bombard you with it all at once, I will run it in installments over the next few days. It was a fascinating discussion, ranging over peak oil, climate change, agriculture, land reform, and much more.
(13 March 2007)
Part 2 is now online.
UPDATE: Part 3 is now online.
The Cassandra of Toledo: A Requiem For Mitigation
Mike Bendzela, The Oil Drum
…I have a lasting impression of Geology Professor Craig Bond Hatfield, University of Toledo, circa 1980: a no-nonsense man in white shirt and skinny tie, flattop buzz cut, and tortoise-shell glasses. At the outset of each class, he would draw a map of North America’s coastline as it currently looks in freehand on the blackboard, and then lecture us on the past coastlines and sedimentary basins of the continent. To have several hundred million years collapsed into a few weeks of Hatfield’s course in Historical Geology is about as close as I’ve come to a mystical experience.
…In late 2003, while reading an on-line article about something called “peak oil,” I saw a bottom-of-the-page citation that permanently influenced how I view the subject:
Oil Back on the Global Agenda. Craig Bond Hatfield in Nature, Vol. 387, page 121; May 8,1997. [Reposted at TOD]
I decided that if Professor Hatfield was involved in the subject, it was clearly something that must be taken seriously. Another early article, “How Long Can Oil Supply Grow?” [PDF] first published in 1997 by the M. King Hubbert Center, lays out all the peak oil arguments in a clear and succinct way – several years before forums like this one began giving voice to such concerns. His was among the earliest voices warning of oil shortages to come in the twenty-first century. Some articles of his go back to the early 1980s.
After a couple of years of dawdling, I decided to look up the professor again after not seeing him for over twenty-five years.
…Q: Please summarize how you first got involved in publishing warnings about the energy crisis.
Professor Hatfield: During the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, I taught annually a graduate course in petroleum geology to geology majors who were just about to complete their master’s degrees and enter the petroleum industry in exploration for crude oil or natural gas.
Throughout this time, I had to keep up with the current literature in petroleum geology, and by the late 1970s, it had become apparent to me that the petroleum industry, in the U.S. and globally, was becoming progressively less successful at finding oil. That is, in spite of steadily improving technology for exploration and drilling, and in spite of increasing rates of exploration for oil, global discovery rates were declining from a peak reached in the early 1960s.
In other words, we were drilling more and finding less. This, coupled with the drop in U.S. oil production rate after 1970, is what made me start writing about future oil supply problems. The timing seemed opportune, because the temporary oil shortages of 1973 and 1979 had made the public aware of our dependence on oil.
So in 1979, I started collecting rejection slips from editors of popular magazines and newspapers, and occasionally an article got accepted for publication.
(14 March 2007)
It’s fitting to show appreciation for those who came before. -BA
Crude addiction: Interview with Dr. Bakhtiari (PDF)
Bruce Madden, Macquarie Bank Ltd.
Peak oil. Two words to strike fear in the heart of our oil-addicted globe. But how real is the risk that oil production is in decline, outstripped by demand and our inability to discover new deposits? Are we on the slippery slope to oil oblivion?
Bruce Madden explores the peak oil phenomenon and its potential implications for the global economy, markets and investors.
…Such [peak oil] views belong to a small but growing league of global oil experts like the Tehran based Dr Ali Morteza Samsam Bakhtiari.
Dr Bakhtiari’s analysis paints a bleak shopping list of potentially catastrophic threats and impacts: ageing oil wells; over-estimated reserves; limited new discoveries; growing demand and dwindling supply; soaring prices;
underinvestment; poor alternatives; geopolitical tensions; suburbia in turmoil and a disbelieving world watching and waiting rather than reacting and planning.
“We are a couple of hurricanes or some geopolitical problems – or a war – away from having a worse problem than we have today,” says Dr Bakhtiari, the recently retired senior adviser for the National Iranian Oil Company and author of several books and more than 65 papers on the oil and gas industry. His current analysis forecasts periods of high volatility with oil prices rocketing up to $300 a
barrel. Then, once the price explodes, it will become a question of availability – countries may be desperate enough to pay any price, but there will not be any oil.
(2006?)
Good coverage of Dr. Bakhtiari, but the description of peak oil theory is over-simplified. For example, the author writes that peak oil theorists believe that oil peaked in 2006 and we are on “the verge of a spectacular crisis.” I think that only a small percentage of peak oil people believe that. -BA
Energize America, DailyKos and Congress
Jerome a Paris, Daily Kos
Many of you here are familiar with Energize America, the plan outlining a sane energy policy that was drafted on this very site by kossacks over a number of months last year. For those of you that are not familiar with that process, I am summarizing it below.
The interesting thing is that, after having gotten a few endorsements from candidates during last year’s election campaign, we have now caught the attention of senior people in Congress, who have explicitly asked us to send them draft legislation. No names have been provided, but they are well positioned to act on these proposals, and if we manage to deliver what they’re looking for, the credibility of Energize America, and that of all of DailyKos, will get a huge boost.
…A little bit of history
I started writing about energy on DailyKos in late 2004. This is the topic I know (I finance the sector, lately focusing on financing wind farms), and, like many of us, I just wanted to share information and insights on a topic I knew. As I wrote quite regularly, my diaries became a sort of “hanging out” place for energy-minded kossacks, and lots of ideas were proposed and discussed (often irrespective of the original content of my diary).
With all the input provided all year long by kossacks, and with the attention of the community focused on the topic after Katrina struck, it made sense to try to propose something to actually use all these proposals. Thus the first draft of the plan was born, posted on the site and critiqued, complimented, complemented, criticised, “get real’ed”, and supported.
(13 March 2007)
Probably of most interest to liberal Democrats in the U.S. However, savvy Republicans might want to appropriate some of the ideas so as to bring their energy platform up to date.
UPDATE: Similar post by Jerome on The Oil Drum.
-BA
