Consumption & Demand

Trend break in oil supply

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The enthusiastic professionals in Paris report that: “Global oil supply fell 250 kb/d to 86.8 mb/d in August, as non-OPEC output dipped to 52.4 mb/d on seasonal maintenance in Canada, the UK and Russia.” As often, the agencies don’t completely agree on what’s going on, with OPEC now seeing July as only a partial restoration of production cuts in June, but the IEA still seeing it as taking production to a higher level. But both concur that August is now below the level of February.

Carpooling

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Across my native USA, I whenever neighbours or townspeople lobby for more bus and rail services, pundits and politicians usually sputter something like this: “Trains and buses are a waste of taxpayers’ money. There’s no reason for them to exist. Look at the ones we have now – they’re mostly empty.”

Energy consumption and progress

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I’ve written lately that economists are the high priests of Progress. I don’t subscribe to the doctrine of Progress, which is a faith-based view of our future. Apparently, for most people all of the time, the alternative is simply unthinkable. The truth is that we had wars 4,000 years ago, and we have wars now. The large majority of human beings were poor and disenfranchised 4,000 years ago, and the large majority still are today.

How I came to the off-grid life

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I was searching for something different when I found the off-grid way of life, but I didn’t know what. I was a journalist, specializing in environmental stories. But this was in the 1990s and mainstream media had little or no time for subjects like pollution caused by factories, or the dangers of pesticides. “Why don’t you, just for once, bring us a story about a kidnapped baby, or something simple?” an embittered news editor once snarled as he spiked my carefully researched and potentially libellous article about pollution from a factory making a well-known brand of photographic film.

A Pearl River tale, power and pride in China

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For a few days last week, global news agencies pursued the peculiar story of the world’s worst traffic jam, which was reported to have lasted for around nine days and stretched across about 100 kilometres of a major highway leading to Beijing. China’s latest instance of leading the world, now in the scale and size of traffic jams, is a direct consequence of the modern uses and abuses of energy.

ODAC Newsletter – Aug 27

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Cairn Energy announced this week that it had found evidence “indicative of an active hydrocarbon system” off Greenland. The news comes in the middle of a bidding round for oil and gas exploration licences there. The US Geological Survey estimated in 2008 that the region contains approximately 90 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, but producing the stuff would combine the extreme challenges of deepwater drilling, extreme cold, and ice. Any accident would be massively harder to deal with than Deepwater Horizon because of the country’s remoteness…