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French PM: “We have entered the post-oil era”
France promises aid to households over oil price
Staff, Reuters
PARIS – The French government will pay 75 euros ($91.49) to millions of families to help them cope with the rise in oil prices, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said on Thursday.
Villepin said several million low-income households which use fuel for heating would receive a 75-euro cheque, and promised to boost the use of renewable energy.
“I know that some of our compatriots are suffering head-on from the rise in domestic fuel and petrol, without being able to immediately adjust their consumption,” Villepin told a news conference.
“We have entered the post-oil era,” he said. “I want to draw all the consequences of this and give a real impulse to energy savings and to the use of renewable energies.” (1 September 2005)
Thats all they wrote, we’d welcome more information on French government actions.-LJ
UPDATE: There’s been a big development in French energy policy that has not been covered in the media, as far as I can see. We re-posted an article about it at energybulletin.net/8334.html. The original is Intelligence Brief: French Energy Policy. -BA
Lundin Petroleum CEO “very much believes in the theory of peak oil” (VIDEO, AUDIO)
Global Public Media
Ashley Heppenstall, C.E.O. of Sweden’s Lundin Petroleum answers a press conference question about the “peak oil theory”.
Lundin Petroleum is an independent Swedish oil and gas exploration and production company. The production is generated from assets in France, Tunisia, Netherlands, Norway, Venezuela, Indonesia, UK and Ireland. In addition there is a significant upside potential within these areas of operation including undeveloped oil and gas discoveries and ongoing exploration programs. Together with the exploration assets in Nigeria, Sudan, Albania and Iran, Lundin Petroleum has a balanced portfolio of world-class assets. Lundin Petroleum has existing proven and probable reserves of 143 million barrels of oil equivalent (mmboe) and a forecast net production for 2005 of 36,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd).
(31 August 2005)
Hurricane Katrina gives us a taste of things to come in an oil-hungry world
Hamish McRae, The Independent
…But if in macroeconomic terms the impact of the hurricane is quite small, there is one aspect of the damage it has caused that may turn out to have global significance. That is the damage to US oil production.
The Gulf of Mexico produces about one quarter of US output and most of this is currently shut down, hence the surge in oil prices to more than $70 a barrel. In the short term the US can release part of its strategic reserve and the likelihood of that has pulled back prices a bit. It may be, too, that the damage to the oil production installations is limited and there will not be any long-term shortfall. That we will not know for some days, maybe weeks. But if there is, this will make a tight oil market even tighter.
If so, the damage to these installations will give us a taste of what it is like to live with shortfalls in production in an increasingly tight global oil market. In other words, it will give us a feeling for the sort of conditions that are likely to prevail in the medium term.
There are three main reasons for this tight market… On the demand side, there has been the surge in demand from China…The second demand side-effect has been the steady rise in US demand…The third influence is the most contentious because it opens up the great debate as to whether the world is close to peak oil production.
The world’s oil reserves are finite and sooner or later oil production will start to decline. The debate is whether that peak is five or 10 years away or whether it is now. The view of the oil majors is that it is some way off, the view also of the world’s largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia. The opposing view is more radical and is made by a few independent geologists and oil consultants, including Matt Simmons, who has recently been advising President George Bush. [Mentions Hubbert and his followers.]
…We already know that this is the first oil shock caused by a rise in demand rather than restrictions on supply. If this line of argument proves right, we face the possibility that prices will not fall back from their present level but continue to rise, or at least plateau. Eventually the Gulf of Mexico will resume production but whatever it produces will be swiftly snapped up by an oil-hungry world. Katrina gives us a taste of what – in the oil market at least – is to come.
(1 September 2005)
September ASPO Newsletter is online
Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, Ireland (ASPO)
Each month, ASPO releases a newsletter which follows the latest peak oil related news and developments. The newsletter is written by Dr Colin Campbell of ASPO Ireland. You can browse the full archive or download PDF copies of the newsletters.
Articles In ASPO Newsletter 57 (September 2005)
* 593 Economic Impact Of High Oil Prices
* 594 Country Assessment – Netherlands
* 595 Kuwait’s Reserves
* 596 Revising the Database
* 597 New books
* 598 International Energy Agency: 2005 Outlook
* 599 Oil and Food
* 600 The Investment Community’s Response to Peak Oil
* 601 Conserving Europe’s Oil
* 602 An impending attack on Iran?
* 603 The World begins to wake up
* 604 The New York Times speaks of Peak Oil
* 605 Light Oil may have passed its peak
* 606 National Academy of Sciences Meeting
* 607 The Mayor of Denver takes Peak Oil seriously
(1 September 2005)
Go to the original site to view web versions of individual articles or to download a PDF of the entire issue.
Oil and energy on BBC radio
BBC via peakoil.com
thegrq writes: Heading Out from The Oil Drum and Ben from theWatt.com were on BBC Radio 5 Live Monday night, on the show “Pods and Blogs”. Heading Out was talking about the oil problems caused by Hurricane Katrina and Ben was talking about possible alternatives to oil.
The full program is available from the BBC here or the 10 minute segment was posted to theWatt and can be downloaded here as an mp3.
(31 August 2005)
Wind, Water and Oil
Big Gav, Peak Energy (Australia)
Roundup of energy news and commentary.
(31 August 2005)
Is it my imagination or has Big Gav come back from his vacation refreshed and ready to blog? His entries for the past couple of weeks have been consistently good. -BA
No one knows where the oil price is heading, but a speculative bubble this is not
Jeremy Warner, The Independent
Steve Forbes, the publisher of the eponymous business magazine, characterises the soaraway oil price as a speculative bubble fed in part by US government buying to top up its strategic oil reserve, and he predicts the price will halve to about $35 a barrel within a year. Likewise the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) has always insisted that the ever rising oil price is largely a speculative phenomenon that will eventually unwind.
Mr Forbes’ prediction may be a foolhardy one, but no major oil company I know of believes the present inflated price will last either. Lord Browne, the chief executive of BP, has gone on record as saying that the price will eventually settle at between $30 and $40 a barrel, though he is not so stupid as to try to predict when.
So if everyone is so confident the price will fall back again, how come it keeps rising in the meantime? Speculative activity is in fact the least likely explanation, though American buying is certainly a part of it. The disruption in Gulf of Mexico production caused by Hurricane Katrina provides most of the answer. Like any other commodity, oil is from time to time influenced by speculative factors, but most of all it is driven by the law of supply and demand. With the world economy still growing at well above trend, demand has remained strong, but the development of new sources of supply has lagged.
(1 September 2005)
Ideas about the Future of Energy in the US
Prof. Goose, The Oil Drum
We are approaching a time when the American people will be paying more attention to energy and the problems we face than ever before. The time to ponder the short- and medium-term future of energy supply in the United States is here.
…My point since we started this project has been that “peak oil” changes the rules of the domestic and geopolitical games. There is no more immediate supply of cheap oil to call upon than what we already extract daily: refining more-sour crude, exploration and retrieval only becomes more and more costly from here on in, and ergo, behaviors and lives will have to change to adapt.
Because of our crippling dependence on petroleum (which will become more obvious each day that passes in the coming weeks), one terrorist attack, one malevolent world leader with oil, or, unfortunately one event like Katrina that disrupts “the Spice” (Frank Herbert’s Dune reference) can bring a country, especially one that uses a quarter of the world’s daily supply of oil, to its knees.
(1 September 2005)
