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Financier (Matt Simmons) sees oil shock from credit crunch
Christopher Johnson, Reuters
The global financial crisis and collapse in the oil market have stalled vital investment in oil exploration and production and are likely soon to lead to a sharp spike in prices, an energy consultant and financier says.
Matt Simmons, founder of Houston-based investment bank Simmons & Co, argues the underlying rate of decline of the world’s aging oilfields is as much as 20 percent a year and only high levels of investment can reduce that to single digits.
With credit tight and oil prices almost $100 a barrel below their highs last year, oil companies are unable to sustain previous levels of spending and the result is falling production, he said in an interview on Thursday.
“We are three, six, maybe nine months away from a price shock. We are not talking about three to five years away — it will be much sooner,” Simmons told Reuters in London.
(26 March 2009)
Is Thorium an Energy Alchemist’s Dream?
Kurt Cobb, Scitizen
Advocates say that already existing thorium fuel and reactor technology could provide centuries and perhaps millennia of safe, abundant nuclear power. Are they right?
… Thorium by contrast appears to be far more abundant than uranium, perhaps three times more abundant than all isotopes of uranium combined. And, it is theoretically possible to turn all of the available thorium into fissile material meaning the total supply on any human time scale is vast.
Besides availability, thorium has three additional distinct advantages over uranium fuel. First, thorium fuel elements can be designed in a way that make it difficult to recover the fissile uranium produced by breeding for bomb making. This reduces the likelihood of nuclear weapons spreading to nonnuclear nations that adopt thorium-based fuel technologies.
Second, the waste stream can be considerably smaller
… The end of the fossil fuel era is coming sooner than most people believe as exponentially increasing fossil fuel consumption brings us ever closer to the day when production will peak for oil, natural gas and coal and then begin irrevocable declines. The only options left for powering a modern technical society will then be solar, wind, tidal, hydroelectric, geothermal and nuclear. And of these, only nuclear can conceivably be located wherever it is needed at the scale required.
The main concern about these replacements is whether they can be built fast enough to head off an overall reduction in the amount of energy available to society. A second concern is the size of the footprint for renewables such as solar and wind, footprints which are orders of magnitude greater than what we are used to with fossil fuel power generation.
(27 March 2009)
Energy pundits duke it out at Aspen Institute
Karl Burkart, Mother Nature Network
Fossil fuel execs and climate activists debate the dwindling ‘bonfire’ of cheap energy.
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If you were following my tweets today, you got a taste of the lively debate going on at the Aspen Environment Forum. A huge snowstorm shut down the highways preventing some of the speakers from attending including Executive Director of the UNEP (United Nations Environment Program) Achim Steiner.
In his place, five climate change pundits took the stage to discuss the unprecedented challenges that lie ahead for the energy industry:
• Libby Cheney, VP of Corporate Sustainability at Shell (not related to Dick)
• Tsutomu Toichi, director of Institute of Energy Economics, Japan
• Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy
• Randy Udall, former director of CORE (Community Office for Resource Efficiency)
• Chris Flavin, president of World Watch Institute
Udall started off with a bonfire metaphor to describe the social issues associated with our fossil fuel consumption. In his eyes, fossil fuels are a “precious gift” that should be shared by all of humanity. But in fact the wealthiest 2 billion of the planet are consuming the lion’s share of the heat from that bonfire.
A second ring of 2 billion benefits from some access to fuel, but the bottom third of the population is out in the cold. Because fossil fuels are such a limited, yes precious resource, finding renewable alternatives is not just about solving climate instability, its also about curing social inequity.
(27 March 2009)
Social critic James Kunstler offers a decidedly darker view
Scott Condon, The Aspen Times
Social critic and author James Howard Kunstler single-handedly offset all the rosy predictions about the clean energy future dominating the Aspen Environment Forum with his incredibly bleak outlook in a presentation Friday.
The economic pains the United States has experienced in the last 18 months are nothing compared to what is coming, he claimed. Kunstler expects economic Armageddon to start in about four months. People are fooling themselves that the economy is showing true signs of recovery, he said.
“The American public has no idea what it’s moving into and how disturbingly different it’s going to be,” Kunstler said.
Here is a sample of what he sees: the multitude of companies that are struggling to prop themselves up now will “roll over and die”; the stock market’s “final rope-a-dope sucker rally” will fail and send it tumbling to the 4,000 level by the end of the year; other nations will no longer invest in U.S. treasury bonds, stripping the stimulus effort of fuel; and, in a prediction that hit the clean energy advocates at the conference hardest, the capital for investment in giant solar and wind farms won’t materialize.
Kunstler has a running feud with the environmental movement, “especially at elite places like Aspen,” as he says on his website, and he took a shot at the presenters and conferees at the environment forum.
He claimed they live in an “energy fantasy world” for thinking that used french fry oil can power the world’s vehicles and that we can resume our consumptive lifestyles after a short period of adjustment.
(28 March 2009)
A CBC Podcast Featuring Peak Oil, Transition Town Totnes and Robert Hirsch
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
Meribeth Dean from Canada visited Totnes a while ago to research an audiopiece for the programme Dispatches for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. The podcast of the programme is now available online here. It also contains an interview with Robert Hirsch. It’s rather good, give it a listen. The programme starts with Hirsch and then moves into the Totnes piece. I particularly like being referred to as ‘thin’ and ‘in his late 30’s’ (I’m 40).
(26 March 2009)
Oil scarcity will spell end of globalisation: Economist Jeff Rubin
The Economic Times (India)
The world may no longer be flat very soon. Contrary to what Thomas Friedman told us after his analysis of globalisation, the world will
indeed become a “whole lot smaller” very soon, if a top Canadian economist is to be believed.
Jeff Rubin, who quit as chief economist of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) here Friday to promote his book ‘Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller,’ said the coming oil scarcity will change the world more profoundly than any other crisis.
He added, “We have all got our eyes right now on the global financial meltdown, but I believe that oil scarcity will change the global economy even more profoundly and in the process change all of our lives – from where we work to where we live to what we eat.”
The Canadian economist said his analysis of the oil economy for over 20 years led him to believe that its (oil’s) scarcity will be the end of globalisation.
(28 March 2009)
