Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Dave Cohen A closer look at the National Petroleum Council (NPC) report: the case of the “missing” graph. Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) been used in the United States for three decades. By its own admission, the NPC’s previous estimates for EOR production didn’t pan out. Are you willing to take the chance that the NPC is right this time?
“Over the next 25 years, the United States and the world face hard truths about the global energy future,” that will require “all economic, environmentally responsible energy sources to assure adequate, reliable supply,” the NPC advises in a 422-page report delivered today to the Secretary of Energy. (Full report and summary now online.)
The rush for ‘biofuels’ is already causing serious damage. Far from being sustainable, the spread of what are more accurately called ‘agrofuels’ – liquid fuels produced from biomass grown in large-scale monocultures – is compromising biodiversity and fuelling human rights violations.
in summary, the NPC report is saying that production will increase by around 25% over the next twenty five years, but this increase is entirely reliant on finding large amounts of new oil, mainly in the Middle East. Unfortunately, it is rather unlikely that the existing claims of oil reserves in the Middle East are true, and even less likely that massive amounts more oil can be found there. Even if it could, the Middle East is the least politically stable region of the world, and relying ever more heavily on it for critical inputs to our economy is likely to be fairly painful at regular intervals.
In China we are witnessing the mass poisoning of a people and the ecological devastation of a nation – and it raises ugly questions about our greed.
While the NPC do have some ‘hard truths’ in their report, they are surrounded in a dense matrix of mumbo-jumbo and irrelevant reassurances about how large the resource endowment is.
NY Times on the NPC report
Dow Jones on the NPC report
Online peak oil book from “Gail the Actuary”
The IEA’s come-to-Jesus moment
Peak oil and entertainment tech
Swiss glacier retreats at a rapid clip
Climate change threatens Italy’s Po River delta
Gulf dead zone to be biggest ever
China says climate change drying up major rivers
Dffects of atmospheric weapons on the environment?
Papers detail industry’s role in Cheney’s 2001 energy report
LA Times: Dingell’s energy bill blind spot; he deserves a “warm spot in Greenland”
House boosts energy efficiency programs but…
Action needed on climate change: Business Roundtable
It seems like a good time to review the general peak oil situation prior to what many believe may be difficult times later this year.
Biofuel demand makes fried food expensive in Indonesia
India: Eight more farmers commit suicide
Ice-cream makers frozen out as corn price rises
Why milk costs more than gas
Conservative MP: Small is inevitable after PO
Robert Putnam and social capital
Designed deterioration
Argentina: Where jobless run factories
