Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Robert Little Breaking the $2-a-gallon gasoline price barrier was unpleasant, and your lightened wallet may be eliciting visions of Nixon-era rationing and fill-up lines beyond the horizon, but geologists and economists think the industry and the economy will be just fine. Gas is cheap, they say, when you consider the rising costs of everything else. But another consensus has emerged among the experts: This might be a good time to panic anyway.
Richard Heinberg on peak oil’s rising recognition in the public sphere, Saudi Arabian reserves, the Shell/Royal Dutch shock, the petroleum plateau, the war on Iraq, 9/11 complicity, and U.S. party politics.
Research presented on May 26th and 27th at the French Institute for Petroleum (IFP) by a wide variety of experts from varying and often competitive perspectives disclosed that, in the year since the first conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) supply, constraints have worsened and the realities of energy depletion are becoming more apparent.
Indonesia is a net oil importer, and as such, should leave OPEC, says its former energy minister. Meanwhile, the high oil prices are have a damaging effect on the nation’s economy.
The U.S. energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, praised on Friday Russia’s plans to increase oil exports to America and highlighted natural gas as the next long-term U.S.- Russia joint energy project.
Scrambling to control high oil prices, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will meet this weekend in Beirut before its official conference there next week and may pursue a plan to raise quotas sharply or do away with them entirely, an OPEC spokesman said yesterday.
The most accessible deposits of fossil fuel are being rapidly depleted. At the same time, alternative energy sources are being viewed more and more as a worthwhile insurance policy against the risk of depending on the Middle East and other unstable regions for the bulk of the world’s oil and gas supply.
The late M. King Hubbert was a visionary in the world of oil and, accordingly, he was either revered or reviled. Then he was forgotten. Now, in a time of oil shortage, some economists are taking a furtive look as his work.
With demand high, supplies squeezed, prices climbing and refineries already running flat out, what if something really went wrong? Something like a terror attack on crucial oil installations in Saudi Arabia or in the United States, or something less sinister but just as disruptive, like a fire or accident at a major refinery or port or a flare-up of civil or labor turmoil in Nigeria or Venezuela?
The oil industry faces more reserves downgrade shocks unless disclosure regulations are radically overhauled, said Matthew Simmons, chief executive and chairman of investment bank Simmons & Co.
WHEN Hu Jintao, the president of China, went half way round the world in February to see President Omar Bongo of Gabon, he was not merely paying a courtesy visit to the African ruler of a population one-thousandth the size of China’s. Hu was after oil.
PetroChina, China’s largest oil producer, has made the nation’s biggest oil discovery in a decade, bolstering its reserves by at least a third at a time when oil prices are at a record and the country’s demand is soaring, the company said Thursday.
