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Petrocollapse conference in Washington DC May 6
Petrocollapse.org
Surviving Peak Oil: Economic Doom or Transformation?
Culture Change and Sustainable Post-Petroleum Living
Will oil supplies decline gradually or will we face “PetroCollapse,” a massive failure of the global petroleum infrastructure to provide the goods and services on which our consumer economy depends?
The DC Petrocollapse Conference will present the facts about Peak Oil, and envision strategies that communities need to achieve post-Peak Oil economic sustainability.
When: Saturday, May 6, 2006, 9am – 7pm
(Media briefing 1:00 – 1:45pm)
Refreshments will be served
Where: All Souls Unitarian Church
at 16th & Harvard Streets NW, Washington, DC
· Albert Bates: Global Ecovillage Network
· Diana Christian: Communities Magazine
· John Darnell: Ph.D. energy advisor
· Richard Heinberg: Author of The Party’s Over and Powerdown
· Michael Kane: Alternative energy analyst, From The Wilderness pubs.
· Jan Lundberg: Petroleum industry analyst, founder of Culture Change
· Pat Murphy: The Community Solution
· Jenna Orkin: Moderator; World Trade Center Environmental Org.
· Mark Robinowitz: Author of Permatopia: A Graceful End To Cheap Oil
· Joel Salatin: Organic Agriculturalist, Author of You Can Farm
The DC Petrocollapse Conference will also feature the DC premieres of two new documentary films: The Power of Community – How Cuba Survived Peak Oil and Our Synthetic Sea, about the planet-wide plastic pollution of the world’s oceans. From 5 to 7 pm, the conference will conclude with music performed by the Peak Oilers (Richard Heinberg on violin, Jan Lundberg playing guitar
(4 May 2006)
UPDATE: Just added this last-minute reminder about the conference this week end.
UC Davis forum on energy future May 16
News office, University of California at Davis
With gasoline prices pushing past $3 a gallon, the president releasing oil reserves to assuage summer vacationers and news of Chinese competition for worldwide energy sources, Americans are anxious about energy issues in the news.
Speakers will discuss these matters and more at a May 16 public forum at UC Davis: “The End of the Age of Oil: Apocalypse or Opportunity?”
The event has been organized by the UC Oil Forum, a new volunteer organization consisting of alumni from several UC campuses dedicated to public education about America’s energy challenges. John Theobald, a lecturer in the UC Davis Department of Communication, organized and chairs the UC Oil Forum and will be the meeting’s moderator.
“We will be laying out the problem, hoping to improve public awareness about energy depletion and trying to spark a discussion about the future,” Theobald said. “Although people involved in the energy industry are very aware of the severity of the problems we face, the issue has been underplayed in the news.”
The meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. to 10:15 p.m. in the UC Davis Athletic and Recreation Center Ballroom. Key speakers are:
* David Goodstein, vice provost and professor of physics and applied physics at California Institute of Technology and a public scientist concerned with fossil fuel and the Earth’s climate. He is former host of “The Mechanical Universe,” an educational television series that has been used by millions of students all over the world, and he will anchor the forum with his talk on “Out of Gas.”
* Randy Udall, co-founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas — USA, and director of Community Office for Resource Efficiency in Aspen, Colo. Udall, who has written about climate change and the energy revolution, is an environmental leader active on the national level. His talk is titled “Energy Challenges and the Future.”
* UC Davis geologist David Osleger and mechanical engineer Andy Frank. Osleger will give insights on the nature and origin of oil, and Frank will discuss “The Plug-in Hybrid — A Here and Now Solution.”
The May 16 event is sponsored by the UC Davis divisions of Social Sciences and of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, the departments of Communication and Geology, and West Coast Asset Management Inc., an independent investment adviser based in Ventura, Calif.
Because seating at the free event is limited, online registration is required. To register go to www.ucoilforum.org.
(3 May 2006)
Also at The Daily Democrat.
ExxonMobil CEO to NBC: No ‘help’ is on the way
The Raw Story
Responding today to questions by NBC’s Today show host Matt Lauer on the topic of high gas prices and peak oil, Exxonmobil Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson has stated consumers shouldn’t be expecting any relief on the way from big oil.
When asked by Lauer if ExxonMobil would “be willing to lower profits over the summer to help out in this time of need and crisis,” Tillerson was unsympathetic.
“We work for the shareholder,” Tillerson told the anchor. “And the investors who own our stock are over 2 million individual Americans and a lot of pension plans, a lot of teacher retirement plans. And our job is to go out and make the most money for those people so that their pensions are secure, so that they see the benefits of our work.”
When asked to clarify that the answer was a “no,” Tillerson explained, “Well, that’s not the business. We’re in the business to make money.”
Just prior to that exchange, Lauer had asked Tillerson, “Are we going to run out of oil someday?”
The oil giant replied, “No, we’re not going to run out of oil anytime in my lifetime or yours. The resource base of the globe is enormous and can support the current demand and can support the future economic growth as well.”
Oil production in the United States peaked in 1971, and has declined since. Some researchers have argued that world oil production peak production will peak some time in the next 15 years. Others have stated they believe it already peaked, naming various points in the last six years.
(3 May 2006)
Note that Tillerson said oil won’t “run out” in our lifetimes — something that most PO people agree with. The relevant question is, when will oil production peak? -BA
OPEC Declines and the World Plateau
Stuart Staniford, The Oil Drum
The EIA came out with the latest International Petroleum Monthly yesterday, which allows us to update the plateau graph, and triggered me into a little investigation of what’s going on with OPEC production.
Firstly, the world situation: … As you can see, the EIA confirms the IEA’s impression that February production is down from the all time peaks of May/December 2005, but still definitely within striking range. The EIA is slightly more negative than the IEA for this month, but the discrepancy between the two is not large by historical standards.
In short, the plateau continues for now, but there certainly is not compelling evidence that we have seen the all-time production peak month at present.
…As you can see, [the “regular” OPEC] countries have the common pattern of steadily increasing production in the early years of our period of interest, followed by each hitting their individual plateau production. The date of that plateau varies from mid 2004 to mid 2005, but what is significant is that no OPEC country has increased production after September 2005! That’s the latest that any of these countries hit their individual production plateaus. And a few of them have declined a bit (Iran looks most noticeable in this respect, though whether this is an additional form of sabre-rattling or due to purely technical factors is unclear).
And that’s a key part of the story about why OPEC production has been declining for the last six months. No OPEC country has been both willing and able to increase production to offset disruptions in Iraq and Nigeria.
So which is it: willing? Or able?
(3 May 2006)
Approving commentary at Gristmill.
US, Saudi energy officials see need for cooperation
Nick Snow, Oil & Gas Journal
WASHINGTON, DC, May 2 — Oil-producing and consuming countries must cooperate to effectively and economically meet the world’s growing oil demand, top energy officials from Saudi Arabia and the US agreed at a Center for Strategic and International Studies forum. But the officials differed on the extent to which alternative fuels should be expected to help.
“We welcome conservation. It benefits the world to begin research on alternative fuels, at least on those that go hand-in-hand with hydrocarbons,” said Ali Ibrahim al-Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s petroleum and minerals minister.
But he warned against mandating alternatives. “Oil remains the most cost-efficient source of transportation fuel. Forcing consumers to switch away from it will cost them more money,” he said.
…When former US Energy Sec. James Schlesinger, who moderated the forum, asked the officials for their views of concerns that the world is approaching an oil production peak, Naimi replied, “I believe there are at least 14 trillion bbl of reserves left, 7 trillion of which are conventional. With advancing technology, we’ll produce more of it.”
Bodman said: “Eventually, we’ll run out of it. We had peak oil production in the US in 1970, and it’s been declining ever since. I am comfortable that the nations which supply our country are working hard to keep oil coming to the marketplace.”
Schlesinger said M. King Hubbert’s theory about peak oil and depletion, while technically sound, failed to consider developing technology, availability of tar sands, and other near-substitutes, and the impact of higher prices on increased production.
Nevertheless, he said, the idea that the world’s crude oil supplies are finite should not be disregarded.
(3 May 2006)
Tough times ahead for energy (Simmons interview)
Jim Puplava, Financial Sense Online
…JIM: Describe the origins of this crisis. How did we get into this predicament?
MATT: Well, if you wanted basically to go back and say when the seeds were really started: they were started when I was a kid in the ’50s, and the world began believing that the Middle East had unlimited amounts of oil that we had barely just started to find, and its costs were so inexpensive that our biggest problem was basically how do we keep the world from being flooded with too much of it. So we have some sort of diversity of supply. At the same time, we’re finalizing atomic energy. There was a debate going on – and this was long before I can remember about it, I’ve just gone and read about it out of curiosity – atomic energy was going to be so free that it didn’t actually warrant creating meters, the meters were way too expensive. Just give it to people for free.
So we kind of laid a foundation of an illusion that we could basically rely on effectively very expensive energy forever, and that the cornucopia of all cornucopias was in the Middle East. What amazes me is that it would appear to me now from a lot of feedback I’ve had that until I stumbled into the curiosity of finding these technical papers, and spent 2 ½ years working on what came out last June, and my book Twilight in the Desert, nobody had actually ever questioned the whole card. We just basically assumed. And so many people assumed it. It was one of those things. There’s no reason to ask how do you know that, because everybody knows it.
And then we made another egregious assumption or mistake – we created satellite TV, and out of that we let the whole world peek on how we lived. As a result China and India and Pakistan and Bolivia said, “I’d really love to live like those people in Canada and the United States do – and Europe. That really looks neat.” So we set the seeds [where] demand is going to grow forever and obviously we’ll be able to supply it because technology is making supply easier and easier to do, and we’ve always got the Middle East. And the problem is that demand was too young and supply was too old and we were giving the energy away for free. [11:03]
…JIM: Haven’t the facts, though, disputed a lot of these assumptions and yet they still exist?
MATT: Well, you know, the problem is that there really weren’t a lot of people that really had the time and inclination to actually doggedly chase down the facts, and there were an awful lot of people that basically loved to give the same talk because they’d heard it ten times so it must be right. And what’s been going on in the last 2 to 3 years is the beginning of an enormously important debate between what are sort of euphemistically called the optimists and the pessimists. And I know most of the optimists. And I know most of the pessimists. The optimists don’t have any facts. They have some firm hunches and beliefs. And the pessimists tend to be scientists who aren’t necessarily very good communicators. People in the audience tend to want to hear good news anyway and a lot of these optimists are very humorous speakers. They make great jokes and then wise people say, “well, the real answer must be half way between.”
But I have to tell you I am very encouraged over the course of the last year by the way the media has reacted. I think the media is doing fabulous work. I think there are at least 50 times more good speakers than there were two years ago on this subject who have done their homework. I think it helped that we ended up having a seven-fold rise in oil prices to start opening people’s eyes. About 100,000 people have read my book, which I think has opened some eyes. I’ve had so many people compliment me that I’m really humbled by it, saying, “you know, whether you’re totally right or slightly off, at least we’ll never again just merrily assume that the Middle East had unlimited amounts of oil.” [17:38]
…JIM: What about biofuels?
MATT: There are probably some biofuels that are really good potential solutions, but any biofuel that has to be planted every year is by definition taking a lot of nutrients out of the soil. Unless you’re using very, very cheap labor, you’re using a lot of energy in your tractors and a lot of energy in your fertilizer. Now take sugarcane-based ethanol in Brazil for instance. They basically don’t uproot the cane. They have cheap labor with machetes that hack it, so that’s actually pretty energy-intensive. The work that’s being done on switch grass, which is this fabulous grass we sort of plowed up in most parts of the Midwest that covered the Great Plains and at one time fed 100 million buffalo, as long as you’re not grazing it with buffalo, it grows between 6 and 8 feet in the peak of the season. You cut it with hay machinery, so it regrows the next spring. There’s a lot of promise in those types of fuels. But what we’re doing is we’re promoting things basically for the sake of subsidies and being callously ignorant of the energy intensity. What we can’t afford the luxury of is creating a whole new suite of energy products that are net energy losers. [39:55]
…JIM: Given where we are and what you know, what should we be doing now?
MATT: Getting as educated as can be on how serious these issues are. Getting as educated as can be on how inexpensive energy still is. Start thinking through all the ways we can rapidly reduce the intensity of how we use oil and gas, so that we make sure we don’t basically waste it unnecessarily. Go on an R&D program the likes of which we’ve never done to create some new forms of energy. But I think that won’t happen soon enough.
So we really have to adopt a big conservation plan: liberating people to work wherever they want to, and when they want to, and pay by productivity, could be one of the really great sort of social revolution things that we do in the next 5 years and basically eliminate all the people in places like California and Texas, for instance, who are spending upwards of 4 hours a day crawling to work in traffic and crawling home so they’re mad when they get to work, and they’re mad when they get home, and they were mad when oil was free. Eliminating our kind of compulsive obsession with having exotic food from all around the world in our supermarkets every place 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year – it’s too energy intensive. Growing stuff at home and canning it. And what we really need to do is ultimately reverse this concept of globalization and go back to actually living in what are euphemistically called villages close to where we work, which can be downtown, but it’s just not 3 hours commute. [41:42]
JIM: What about the rail system?
MATT: The rail system needs to be totally overhauled and totally rebuilt, and use the rail system to ship goods and people but in shipping goods only do it as far as you can ship goods to water, and then get goods on marine based transportation, barges or vessels, and use our water system as the way we basically deliver goods as close to where the kind of end point is – sort of like Federal Express does. And we can actually do all of this stuff. I mean if we applied this on a global basis with the same intensity as we had to build the war machine for World War II, we could get this done in 5 to 7 years. [42:24]
(29 April 2006)
Go to the original for the complete interview. Submitter Lorax says:
Jim Puplava interviews Matthew Simmons on the current state of the world energy situation, including peak oil, the media, tar sands, corn ethanol, saudi oil and more. Excellent interview.
