Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Shale gas plays in the United States are commercial failures and shareholders in public exploration and production (E&P) companies are the losers. This conclusion falls out of a detailed evaluation of shale-dominated company financial statements and individual well decline curve analyses.
Last week, I participated (as an invited speaker) in the 7th Advances in Energy Studies Conference in Barcelona, Spain. Other invited speakers were Charlie Hall, Joe Tainter, Marcel Collel, and Seth Blumsack. Other Oil Drum staff members at the conference were Ugo Bardi and Dave Murphy–Ugo as one of the speakers, and Dave as the second author on Charlie Hall’s presentation. Dave also asked lots of good questions! In this post, I give a few highlights of the conference.
Environmentalists, especially in wealthy countries, have often approached the question of environmental sustainability by stressing population and technology, while deemphasizing the middle term in the well-known IPAT (environmental Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology) formula. The reasons for this are not difficult to see. Within capitalist society, there has always been a tendency to blame anything but the economic system itself for ecological overshoot.
“Fast Time” is the world I live in, the one with a two hour meeting scheduled at 7pm, my husband’s classes at 12:35, Eli’s bus at 8:15 and 3:30… payments due by the first of the month, etc… It is the world run on clocks and calendars, where expectations can be fixed and formalized. All of us live in fast time in some measure, some of us almost completely, others only barely. There is, however, no good way of escaping it entirely.
I also live in slow time. Slow time is the world of things that cannot be subject to fast time – things that take their own time, that you cannot schedule, that get done when they are ready. This is the time in which the wheat is ready to harvest, in which babies are birthed, in which winter sets in for real, in which children learn to walk or read or ride a bicycle, in which the plums ripen, in the ill recover strength, in which bread rises, in which change happens.
Through an accident of plate tectonics and other developments over geological time, most of the world’s remaining recoverable oil is situated around the Persian Gulf. This is unfortunate for us because we will thus never have a reasonable, universally agreed-upon estimate of the amount of oil left to produce. Let me explain.
– Bacteria ‘R’ Us
– Cultural Impersonations and Appropriations: A Fashion Report (Veblen brought up-to-date)
– Existential Comfort in the Age of Hopkins and Greer, Part V
– John Bellamy Foster: The ecology of consumption (chapter from book)
– In Chile, the lessons of isolation: humans are not wolves
– In Kansas, Climate Skeptics Embrace Cleaner Energy
– Uttering the “C” Word (still afraid of conservation)
– Oil Sands Effort Turns on a Fight Over a Road
– Lundberg v. Lundberg, Santa Barbara
Authors from three politically disparate think tanks—American Enterprise Institute, Brookings, and Breakthrough Institute— recently published a report on how to foster deployment of clean energy technology. Most worrying (though least surprising) is the authors’ belief that clean energy innovation breakthroughs can drive continued economic growth. Conservation is not something most environmental think-tanks or NGOs (not to mention the likes of American Enterprise Institute) want to discuss, but I dare say it will have a much bigger role in our energy future than "innovative, small-scale nuclear reactors."
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-The strike in France
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the Global Economy
-OPEC
-Lifting the deepwater ban
At the recent (2010) ASPO-USA conference, we reviewed, in our presentation on net oil exports, two examples of production peaks in oil producing regions. We also reviewed “Net Export Math” and we looked at some examples of net export declines. Finally, we reviewed our projections for net oil exports from the top five net oil exporters in 2005, followed by two scenarios for global net oil exports. In this paper we will briefly review the highlights of our presentation.
One reason that we may abandon a technology is that the costs outweigh the benefits. Thus the fridge has been abandoned because the cost of maintaining it outweighs the benefit of keeping lunch cold. Other reasons might be that the technology is no longer supportable (for example, if you cannot access fuel, your car is not going anywhere) or another technology appears/reappears to replace it. In this post, I would like to propose a theory by which some, or potentially many, modern technologies could be abandoned. This is an important issue because of its implications for government policy, business investment and of course society as a whole.
