Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The abrupt decision by Teck Resources to withdraw its application for the Frontier bitumen mine project reveals a truth that politicians like Jason Kenney and other industry boosters continue to deny — that investing large sums of money in Canada’s oilsands no longer makes any financial sense.
Oil prices collapsed Monday amid falling energy demand and the global response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, as the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide reached over 113,000. On Friday, talks disintegrated inside the so-called OPEC+ alliance, which includes Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) as well as non-OPEC members like Russia.
Between 1970 and 2018, the UK population rose from 56m to 66m, but both total energy use and carbon emissions fell in this same period. This was because coal – the most carbon-intensive of the fossil fuels – was nearly eliminated, cleaner natural gas consumption rose slightly and then fell, and oil consumption stayed the same, as the growing area of transport remained oil-dependent.
Their new book Energy Storage and Civilization: A Systems Approach (Springer, February 2020) is an important contribution to biophysical economics – marvelously clear, deep and detailed where necessary, and remarkably thorough for a work of just over 150 pages.
No longer should our survival be an afterthought. If we are to withstand the climate crisis, every decision should begin with the question of what the planet can endure. This means that any discussion about new infrastructure should begin with ecological constraints. The figures are stark.
The UK’s CO2 emissions fell by 2.9% in 2019, according to Carbon Brief analysis. This brings the total reduction to 29% over the past decade since 2010, even as the economy grew by a fifth.
In 1969, the late Professor Albert Bartlett famously delivered a lecture, entitled “Arithmetic, Population and Energy”, which begins with the observation that, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” The truth of this is profound and irrefutable…
In mid-January, Adam Waterous, who operates the private equity firm Waterous Energy Fund, made a prediction about the crown jewel of the U.S. shale oil industry, the Permian shale play that straddles Texas and New Mexico.
“We think we are at or near peak Permian,” Waterous told Bloomberg. “The North American oil market has been grossly overcapitalized, which is not sustainable.”
A new study published in Nature may have ended a long scientific debate about the key source of rising methane levels in the atmosphere.
It found that methane emissions from human activities — mainly fossil fuels — are probably 25 to 40 per cent higher than previously estimated, while natural sources of methane emissions are up to 90 per cent lower than previously estimated.
As oil prices plummet, oil bankruptcies mount, and investors shun the shale industry, America’s top oil field — the Permian shale that straddles Texas and New Mexico — faces many new challenges that make profits appear more elusive than ever for the financially failing shale oil industry.
Many of those problems can be traced to two issues for the Permian Basin: The quality of its oil and the sheer volume of natural gas coming from its oil wells.
Radical changes are needed if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change: 2 trillion dollars of fossil fuel related capital investment has to go. Without a better understanding of the basic relationships between energy and production it is hard to say how such changes will play out in the wider economy, and almost impossible to prepare to face them.
Human-caused emissions of methane from the extraction and use of fossil fuels may have been “severely underestimated”, a new study suggests.
The research indicates that “natural” emissions of fossil methane, that seeps out of deeply-held reserves, make up a much smaller fraction of total methane emissions than previously thought.
