Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Wikileaks may have told us what we already knew – that Saudi oil reserves are greatly inflated – but the reports also portray leaders of the highly secretive petro-state feeling “under the gun” as they strive to move their economy away from dependence on oil.
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.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Development this week
-Wikileaks
-The Guardian, Wikileaks cables and oil production in Saudi Arabia
-Saudi Reserves
-What did we learn from the Saudi cables?
-Saudi Oil Production and Reserves – Reasons Behind Wikileaks Concerns
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.
Ohio, the home of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and site of the world’s largest oil-producing provinces in the late 19th century, is again at the center of the action in domestic fossil fuel production as a controversial drilling technique, known as fracking, is draining Ohio’s remaining oil and gas reserves. With global oil production peaking and the number of new large oil finds dwindling, is increased domestic production in Ohio and other states through fracking a vital contribution to our energy security, or a fate to be fought?
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The El Arish explosion
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
We have always assumed that we can have cheap and available ingredients for our societal “recipe” for how our current economy functions. Now this assumption is coming into question.
In a report meant to be both inspiring and reassuring, the WWF ambitiously declares that the world can switch to 95% renewable energy sources by 2050. The Scenario depends largely on increased efficiency and regulated flows of energy through a great system of interconnection. People are remarkably absent. The ostensible reason is that the report is focused on what is “technically possible,” which is more about joules and btus than about human behavior.
In an interconnected global world, revolutions in far away countries can cause strategic realignments or economic problems that will affect us all.
Nervousness about the mounting political turmoil in Egypt kept Brent blend above $100/barrel this week. There is concern not only about oil deliveries through the Suez Canal and the Sumed pipeline, but also the wider context…
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-Risk to energy supplies
