Kurt Cobb

The week of the game changer in oil, or was it?

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This past week was supposedly the week of the game changer in the world of oil. Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables from Saudi Arabia called into question the ability of the globe’s largest oil exporter to raise production to satisfy a world increasingly thirsty for petroleum. In the United States a technique called hydraulic fracturing–which has seemingly unlocked vast natural gas resources–will now be applied to oil trapped in shale deposits. Are these two developments really the so-called game changers they are claimed to be?

Food & agriculture – Feb 13 (updated Feb 14)

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– Paul Krugman: Droughts, Floods and Food
– China bids to ease drought with $1bn emergency water aid
– U.N. Food Agency Issues Warning on China Drought
– North Korea appeals to foreign governments for food aid
– NYT’s Andrew Revkin: Egypt, Inkblots, Agendas and Feeding 9 Billion
– Wes Jackson: Halting obsession with carbon is key to sustaining agriculture
-Produce prices skyrocket with freeze in Mexico, Southwest

Preface to a Prelude to Peak Oil

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Prelude may be the first thriller novel explicitly about peak oil (numberless thrillers concern the nefarious machinations of international oil conglomerates — ultimately those are stories about peak oil too). It follows a short period in the life and career of Cassie Young, an oil industry analyst based in Washington, DC.

Enough childish name calling

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In an article peppered with inaccuracies and faulty logic, the author makes a claim that is way off target – an accusation that those advocating a steady state economy are misanthropists. On the contrary, we want to see good lives for all, now and into the future, secured through sound management of our ecological assets, and a quality of life that includes meeting material needs – but recognizing material needs as only one aspect of the totality of being human.

ODAC Newsletter – Feb 11

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Saudi Arabia’s recoverable oil reserves may have been overstated by 40%. That was the warning sent to Washington from its embassy in Riyadh in 2007, according to a cable released by Wikileaks this week. The source was Sadad al-Husseini, former head of E&P at Saudi Aramco, who allegedly told US diplomats in Riyadh that Saudi’s claimed reserves of some 700bn bbls were overinflated by 300 billion barrels of ‘speculative resources’, and that output would peak once the kingdom had produced half of its original proven reserves of 360bn barrels. With 116bn produced so far, the diplomats concluded that on this basis Saudi’s peak could come in the early 2020s.

Growth of wood biomass power stokes concern on emissions

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The only way that biomass achieves carbon neutrality is if growing forests sequester — that is, absorb from the atmosphere — as much or more carbon dioxide than is released in the burning process…It takes only seconds to burn a tree’s worth of wood, and decades for that tree to grow back and sequester the same amount of carbon.