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The Challenge of Global Warming and Peak Oil for Local Government
Municipal Association of Victoria
One day conference with strong speaker list and full set of presentations available at link.
Roger Bezdek, President, Management Information Services Inc.
Strategies required to cope with peak oil 558 KB
Donald Coventry, Association of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO) Australia
Implications of peak oil for local government 534 KB
Peter Cosier, Executive Director – The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists
Global Warming: Awareness, Implications and Strategic Choices 260 KB
Kevin Hennessy, CSIRO Climate Impacts & Risk Group
Climate change in Victoria: Evidence, future impacts and solutions 950 KB
Prof. Robert Adams, Director – City Design, City of Melbourne
Council House 2: Creating the best future 3.93 MB
Lee Smith, Visy Recycling
Waste: It’s a case of the bigger, the better 2.30 MB
Phillippa England, Griffith University
Climate Change: what are local governments liable for? 70 KB
Mark Canaider, Bega Valley Shire Council
A plan to reduce local engery use by 50% and to generate of 50% of power used by clean renewable energy by the year 2020 1.31 MB
Peter Newman, Director of the Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy, at Murdoch University WA
Climate Change, Oil and Cities: What does it mean for Melbourne? 5.60 MB
Jack Holden, Team Leader, City Sustainability – City of Melbourne
Carbon Neutral – Reality or hot air? 741 KB
Barry Hooper, CO2 Co-operative Research Council (CRC)
Geosequestration: we may need it sooner than we think 5.99 MB
Greg Hunt, Western Port Greenhouse Alliance (WGA)
The regional perspective on climate change 561 KB
Paul Holper, CSIRO Marine & Atmospheric Research
Climate change – How is it likely to affect your region? 4.09 MB
Adam Davis, Manager – Environmental Health & Protection
Local government in a carbon constrained future 721 KB
(26 June 2007)
Peak oil and climate change conference (Audio)
Steve Martin ABC- South West Victoria
Ballarat and South West Victoria mornings part 03
Dennis Olmstead, manager of the National Center for Sustainability, discusses a recent conference on peak oil and climate change sponsored by the Municipal Association of Victoria. He recaps the key conference topics, such as the decline in discovery of new oil deposits, future energy consumption, and the impact of higher prices. It’s not all bad news, he says: carbon trading can have positive effects on regional economies, and as indicated in the oft-quoted Stern report, the most benefit can be reaped if changes are undertaken now.
9Mb MP3 Audio File The interview runs for first 19 of 25 minute file
(2 July 2007)
Starts slowly as Mr Olmstead gives basics to all-news-to-me interviewer, gathers pace to cover issues with biofuels, changeover costs and urban design. When asked for hope Mr Olmstead emphasises public transport and benefits for regional and local economies.-LJ
Russian Oil Exports Fall, Duties Advance
Bloomberg via Moscow Times
The country’s crude oil exports fell 6.9 percent in June as higher export duties encouraged oil companies to refine more crude domestically.
Russia produced 9.85 million barrels per day in June, according to preliminary data from the Industry and Energy Ministry’s information center. Output rose 0.4 percent from May.
Urals blend exported from Russia, rose 10 cents to $68.33 at 12:58 p.m. in northwestern Europe Monday.
Russia revises its oil export duty every two months based on the average international price. The duty rose to $200.60 per ton in June, and will advance to $223.90 from Aug. 1.
Pipeline monopoly Transneft exported 4.25 million barrels per day, 6.9 percent less than in May.
(3 July 2007)
Contributor and independent geologist Jeffrey J. Brown (“westexas”) writes in a post at TOD:
It’s not in dispute that Russian demand is exploding–to the point that Pravda is calling for measures to reduce domestic oil and gas consumption–and Russia showed a year over year decline in net exports from 2005 to 2006 (EIA, Total Liquids), even with an increase in production.
So, IMO, the only question is how sharp the decline in net exports from Russia will be.
This is why I was so certain back in January, 2006, we were facing problem with net exports–if lower production doesn’t cause lower exports, it’s a pretty good bet that rapidly rising domestic consumption in exporting countries will.
What continues to amaze me is that this simple premise is not THE key issue regarding Peak Oil.
North Sea output continues to drop despite record investment
Mark Williamson, The Herald (Scotland)
The decline in oil and gas production in the UK North Sea continued in April, despite record investment in 2006, in what economists at Royal Bank of Scotland said was another sign that the province is maturing rapidly.
The latest oil and gas index from Royal Bank shows that combined average daily oil and gas production for the UK Continental Shelf stood at 2,823,141 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d) in April. This was about 2.3% lower than in March, ending a run of six consecutive monthly increases. The underlying rate of production continued on a firmly downward trend, falling 7.8% compared with April last year.
…Against the backdrop of a continuing surge in investment in response to buoyant energy markets, the figures show that operators are having to work increasingly hard to try to maintain production.
An increasing share of output on the UKCS is coming from fields that have come off plateau production levels and from smaller fields.
(3 July 2007)
Oil- A Decade Past
Sri Jegarajah, CNBC
A decade on from Asia’s financial crisis, the oil market has witnessed an unprecedented bull run. The surge in prices has seemed unsustainable with some commentators likening the jump to the dot com tech bubble. However, this particular bubble in the commodities market shows no signs of bursting as long as the twin powerhouses in the region — China and India — continue to grow.
We’ve seen U.S. oil futures close in on $80 a barrel oil because of a ‘perfect storm’ of bullish news — strong demand, a devastating hurricane season in the U.S., refining bottlenecks and concerns over supply disruptions prompted by turmoil in the Middle East and unrest in OPEC producers such as Nigeria and Venezuela.
…Now the scenario is one of oil prices spiraling upwards not down and OPEC’s critics say the group is irrelevant, unable to control mounting oil prices because it doesn’t have as wide a margin of spare production capacity than previous years.
The ghost of Jakarta may be laid to rest but oil markets are facing a markedly different set of challenges to the ones a decade ago. Will China’s seemingly insatiable demand start to slow as the authorities try to cool the red-hot economy and tame the surging stock market? Will the threat of supply disruptions from OPEC producers in the Middle East, Nigeria and Venezuela grow and, where will Asian consumer nations turn to for alternatives? Will the battle for energy security continue to pit China, Japan and India against one another and, of course, will greener environmentally friendly fuels replace traditional sources of energy? Watch this space.
(2 July 2007)
Energy security in Trinidad & Tobago
Mary King, Trinidad & Tobago Express
[Mary King devotes the first part of her column to comments from peak oil writers Rod Campbell-Ross and Jeffrey J. Brown. She then goes on to discuss the situation in Trinidad and Tobago.]
… Last week’s article also referenced the increasing control that governments are exerting on petroleum resources: Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru. Government-owned oil companies now control some 93 per cent of the world’s proven reserves. The 13 largest oil companies are national oil companies which are initiating new domestic and political behaviour. Russia is moving in the same direction to regain state control of its petroleum assets by, for example, in its forced buyout by Gazprom of bp’s joint venture in Kovykta, one of the largest natural gas fields in the world.
Schlumberger estimates that the world will lose some eight per cent of its present production capacity between 2006 and 2010 (24mmb/d) which will be impossible to replace by new finds. The result of all of this is a dramatic search in the world today for secure energy assets such as Canada’s oil sands and the deep-water Gulf of Mexico (ref Tom Petrie). Yet we see that this capital is hesitant to take up such deep water offers in T&T. What does this tell us of our prospects of increasing our reserves via FDI?
First, governments are reclaiming their petroleum assets which will change the world energy markets. Secondly, the prospect of cheap energy is gone and with the decline of the world’s massive producing fields finding petroleum will be more and more expensive. Hence it is not business as usual either for importers or exporters. It is even of more concern to energy-based plantation economies like ours especially with limited reserves.
Surely then our policy for the use of our reserves must be conservation and optimum use of these resources in which energy security, for local consumption and export so as to live as we restructure the on-shore economy, becomes pre-eminent.
(2 July 2007)
TOD Canada energy news roundup
Stoneleigh, TOD:Canada
Today we are looking at the drying up of surface water in the arctic, resource royalties and equalization payments, deep integration of the North American economy, uranium mining, smart metering and biofuels.
We are also following the rapidly developing credit crunch. The Bear Stearns hedge fund fiasco continues, with worries that other funds may also be affected. Controversy is developing over the role of rating agencies and there are substantial concerns about valuations of CDO funds, many of which are held by insurance companies and pension funds. IMO this is the beginning of a very serious financial crisis. (comment at TOD)
(3 July 2007)
Two suggestions for aggregators:
- Combine an overview (such as this post) with the listing of headlines.
- Organize the list into categories (such as “oil” and “climate”). Douglas Low has just begun doing this with the ODAC news (for example July 1 news), making it much easier to find what you want.
-BA
