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UK Organisations That Recognise Peak Oil
Chris Vernon, The Oil Drum: UK
The Soil Association is a 60 year old UK organisation responsible for setting standards in organic farming. They describe themselves as “UK’s leading environmental charity promoting sustainable, organic farming and championing human health.” Their logo is the UK’s most recognisable trademark for organic produce. It is found on more than 70% of all UK organic produce.
They have also recently annouched an major peak oil initiative, it goes by the name of Food and Farming – Post Peak Oil and they are hoping to raise £100,000.
…This is certainly a welcome development, illustrating a growth in peak oil awareness and adding credibility to the message through association with such a credible organisation. I wonder how many other UK organisations are addressing peak oil as the Soil Association are now?
I’m going try and collate a list of UK organisations that publicly recognise peak oil. These organisations disserve recognition for their position but it is also interesting to see if there is any commonality between these organisations. Why are they speaking up and not others?
(12 Aug 2006)
Designing the Future
PeakEngineer, PeakOilDesign
The Peak Oil community focuses its efforts on two main themes: predicting the peak and exploring sustainable life. There is a great deal of discussion on sustainable design and organic subsistence farming, but there is very little in the way of comprehensively engineering future communities. I would like to change that fact.
A formalized engineering framework is needed in order for effective post-peak oil design. This goes far beyond the sustainable design or green building initiatives — Peak Oil Design requires careful analysis of not only the nature of your shelter, but what you will produce, how you will produce it, how you will store it, and who you need to produce it. The list is lengthy and complicated.
Much of this information already exists singly within the blogosphere and elsewhere, but it is not taken as part of a comprehensive design. My approach is to use a Systems Engineering methodology to pull the required information together and develop the skill set needed.
Systems Engineering is an approach to defining all required aspects of a system by a comprehensive life-cycle analysis. It is an iterative technique that requires individuals from many different specialties in order to succeed. In the course of my career as a NASA engineer*, I have found systems engineering a very powerful and necessary tool.
My vision for this blog is to develop an engineering method for complete design of post-Peak Oil communities. I plan to post on varying aspects of community design — anything from construction techniques and crop planning to required skill sets and security — all progressively developed into a formal engineering methodology that we all can use as a blueprint for designing our own communities.
The key to systems engineering is open communication and iterative discussion, so comments are absolutely essential for the success of this project. One important thing to remember is that this project will never be completed — as more information is compiled, the domain expertise of the Peak Oil community will expand and further enable a thriving sustainable future. Let’s let this be the first post of many!
* Any opinions or statements found on this site are not representative of NASA or the U.S. government
(2 Aug 2006)
New blog, next two posts, to be read in order are:
They form a very brief but illuminating introduction to systems engineering approaches. We look forward to more.
-AF
Ripe for revolution
Alan Wartes, So Long, Hydrocarbon Man
A revolution is coming, ready or not. It’s about time, too, if you ask me…
It is called peak oil – the end of the era of Hydrocarbon Man. It will initiate the most “dramatic change in ideas or practice,” the world has ever known. It is far more than the usual changing of the faces on the money. This one strikes at the roots of our very survival. Declining supplies of oil and the radically rising prices that will follow, are going to upend everything we take for granted. Nothing will be left untouched or unchanged. We will change how we think and how we live, or we will die. It’s hard to get more revolutionary than that.
(8 Aug 2006)
The real price of oil
Stephen Corley, ITP – Business
…Despite the well-documented collapse in Arab stock markets – and the domino effect effect on spending – high liquidity from oil revenues looks likely to remain the region’s defining feature for years to come. Meanwhile, of course, the rest of the world is frantically assessing more short-term economic ramifications of price spikes.
Yet, although some may wail, oil prices are not breaking all-time records. Nor are they anomalies caused by headline-dominating geopolitical unrest: the violent conflict that continues to engage Israel and Lebanon has, in truth, almost no effects on oil prices, as it presents no genuine threat to supply. Current prices simply reflect another step in the longest upward march in the history of oil trading – indeed, a trend that has dovetailed with perhaps the central issue confronting a generation – as global demand increases for a finite precious resource.
…Several things flow from sustained higher oil prices. First, substitution becomes a much more attractive proposition.
The implications of the long-term bull market in oil are so far-reaching because it currently affects the cost of so much else – travel, heating, agriculture, trade and plastics, etc… But most experts recognise that the age of conventional oil will fade during the next century. Optimists rely on the fact that price and technology will allow for production of heavy oil, tar sands and shale oil, whose combined global reserves far exceed those of conventional oil.
The problem with these deposits is that their extraction involves one of the dirtiest processes known to mankind and any progress towards a less oil reliant economy will almost certainly need to consider environmental issues. However, coal liquefaction and gasification, improved gas-to-liquids technology and alternatives to oil, led initially by conventional and unconventional natural gas all offer additional potential. Hence the counter argument to the prevailing idea that we are locked in a death spiral of rising energy costs.
…The key question is whether we have reached what geologists term peak oil; output at the top of the production bell curve after which supply is always falling, together with higher costs of extraction. Regional analysts had to consider the realities of this during 2005 when the Burgan field, Kuwait’s biggest and the world’s second largest, passed its maximum production point.
The one thing the gloomiest geologist and the sunniest economist can agree on is that world’s oil demand is rising.
…So if we are at or about to enter peak oil, then global production can be expected to decline steadily at about 2-3% a year. Combined with the sort of heady demand we will continue to experience from the US to India and China, this can only lead to one thing, strong upward pressure on the spot price.
This is certainly good for the region. As a net recipient this year of around $300bn from oil within the GCC, with at least $50bn heading into the UAE alone, the Gulf can probably expect the foundations to be laid for some new airports, business parks, roads and new themed projects. Some observers warn, however, that an economic boom often involves over expansion and diversification, which is due less to business prowess and ability and more to do with egos.
(13 Aug 2006)
“ITP is the largest business and consumer magazine publisher in the Middle East, with a wide range of market-leading titles covering almost all major areas of interest.”
More articles in ITF by Stephen Corley
“400,000 barrels here, 400,000 barrels there. Pretty soon, you’re talking about a lot of oil.”
Original: “Peak Oil — get used to it”
Byron King, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
When the shutdown in Alaska rattled markets around the world, it showed just how fragile the oil supply really is
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To paraphrase the late Sen. Everett Dirksen, “400,000 barrels here, 400,000 barrels there. Pretty soon, you’re talking about a lot of oil.”
I am referring to the recent announcement by BP that it is temporarily shutting down its Alaskan oil operations in Prudhoe Bay. Corrosion in the 30-year old transit lines makes it unsafe to continue operations. BP is removing 400,000 barrels per day of oil from the world’s markets. Repairing the transit lines, which gather oil from the wellheads and move it to the main pumping stations along the Alaska Pipeline, will take many months to accomplish. In the interim, the world will simply do without 400,000 barrels of oil every day (though on Friday BP said it was working on bringing back a portion of production).
How much is 400,000 barrels? Imagine 26 Olympic-sized swimming pools, each filled to a depth of over six feet with oil pumped from the ground. Or compare 400,000 barrels with the capacity of a modest-sized oil tanker (not to be confused with an ultra-large crude carrier that can hold about 2 million barrels). What does it mean not to have access to 400,000 barrels of oil? Imagine that tanker ship sinking, every day. That is how much oil is no longer available to the world’s markets.
400,000 barrels is not quite 5 percent of U.S. daily oil production. 400,000 barrels is about 0.5 percent of daily world oil extraction, which presently totals about 84 million barrels per day.
Within 24 hours of BP’s announcement that it was shutting off 400,000 barrels per day of oil extraction, the anticipation of future scarcity drove the price of oil upward on world markets by about $2.50 per barrel. Multiply this by the total 84 million barrels of world daily oil consumption. It adds about $210 million to the world’s daily oil bill.
There is another, even larger aspect to the BP announcement and the dramatic market reaction. This involves the concept called “Peak Oil” — a shorthand way of describing a critical geological concept that you ignore at your peril.
(13 Aug 2006)
UPDATE (Aug 13) Just noticed that the article was re-published by Kuwait Times, an English-language paper founded in 1962 (more history).
This article was written by Byron King, a regular contributor to Energy Bulletin.
-BA
