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Oil at $100 May Look `Cheap’ Within Five Years, Alfa Bank Says
Mark Barton and Sarah Walker, Bloomberg
Crude oil prices of $100 may look “cheap” within five years if OPEC production fails to keep pace with global demand growth, according to Alfa Bank.
“We may hit peak oil in the course of the next three, four or five years, in which case $100 oil will look somewhat quaint,” Alfa Bank’s Moscow-based Head of Research Ronald Smith said in an interview with Bloomberg television.
(21 February 2008)
Contributor Marc writes: The genie seems to be squirming out of the bottle.
End of the Oil Age
John Lippert and Alan Ohnsman, Bloomberg
Bill Reinert, an innovator of Toyota’s gasoline-saving Prius, says carmakers aren’t moving fast enough to cope with global warming and $100-a-barrel crude. Hybrids, plug-ins and electric-only vehicles must take center stage to help the planet avoid environmental and economic disaster.
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Bill Reinert, who helped design Toyota Motor Corp.’s Prius hybrid, hovers in a helicopter 1,000 feet over Fort McMurray, Alberta. On this clear November morning, he’s craning for a look at one of the world’s largest petroleum reserves where there’s not an oil well in sight. Instead, in a 2-mile-wide pit below, trucks head to refineries with loads of sand weighing more than Boeing 747s. Yellow flames shoot skyward as 900-degree-Fahrenheit (482-degree- Celsius) heat liquefies any embedded petroleum. Floating scarecrows and propane-powered cannons do their best to chase migrating birds from lethal wastewater ponds. Eventually, nuclear reactors may surround the crater 270 miles (435 kilometers) northeast of Edmonton, Alberta, delivering the power required to wring oil from sand.
“This is what the end of the age of oil means,” says Reinert, 60, who plans the vehicles Toyota will make in a quarter century as national manager for advanced technology at the U.S. sales unit in Torrance, California. “The car-based culture, the business-as- usual of building cars and trucks, is going to change dramatically.”
… Wells predicts world oil production will peak at about 100 million barrels a day in about a decade. By 2030, output will fall to today’s level of 87 million barrels. Declining production will collide with rising demand, which could hit 118 million barrels a day by 2030 if trends were to continue, the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts. “When production levels off, if the price is $200 or $300 a barrel, then that’s what people will pay,” Wells says. [Peter Wells, director of research firm Neftex Petroleum Consultants Ltd. in Abingdon, England.]
…Since 1950, the world has been blessed with an eightfold increase in oil production. Yet the peak discoveries for new oil came in 1962, petroleum consultant Wells says. Total production outside the former Soviet Union and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries topped out two years ago, he says. Oil in the former Soviet Union will reach its highest level in about five years; OPEC will peak in about 10, he says.
In the interim, nations will be more dependent on the Middle East, where getting oil is complicated by war, political turmoil and declining output from mature wells. “After a series of incidents in the Persian Gulf, or a low-level nuclear exchange that shuts off oil supplies, you wouldn’t have a short-term disruption like Katrina,” Reinert says. “You would have a profound one- or two- or three-year period in which economies and governments fail.”
(March 2008 issue)
The article is the cover story for the March 2008 edition of Bloomberg Markets Magazine.
Peak Oil Task Force tells town to prepare for post-petroleum world
Bob Audette, Battleboro Reformer (Vermont)
The world is running out of petroleum and Brattleboro better prepare itself for that eventuality. That was the message from the Peak Oil Task Force at Tuesday night’s Selectboard meeting.
The group, part of Post Oil Solutions, was asked to give a presentation on its research into a world of declining petroleum supplies.
“There is a factual basis to peak oil and that, in fact, there is reason to believe that peak oil may have already occurred,” said Rose Avenia of Townshend, reading from the task force’s report.
Post Oil Solutions is a Brattleboro-based citizens group that has initiated a number of projects designed to build greater sustainability and community in the Windham County region.
Inspired by a similar group in Portland, Ore., the Brattleboro version of the peak oil task force is the first of its kind in Vermont, and was first proposed to the Selectboard in May 2007.
(21 February 2008)
Expert: Energy crisis here, climate change on the horizon
Ben Aaronson, Lincoln Journal (Mass.)
… “I think [a global energy crisis] is really happening now. It’s less visible to us in North America because we’re not seeing the same fallout that is happening in other countries,” said Richard Lawrence, director and co-founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas-USA (ASPO-USA), a nonprofit and non-partisan research and public education initiative.
Lawrence, who lives in Hudson, gave a talk at the Lincoln Public Library on Jan. 30, entitled, “Converging Storms: Peak Oil and Climate Change.” His message: An energy crisis is much closer than people think as energy in all forms is becoming less available and therefore, more expensive.
(21 February 2008)
