Energy Policy

Bakken shale and U.S. oil production

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On Sept. 25, 2011 National Public Radio’s All Things Considered program had a segment consisting of what I considered highly questionable information concerning oil production in the Bakken Shale region of North Dakota and U.S. oil production in general. The segment indicated that U.S. oil production would rise dramatically in the foreseeable future due to new technological developments. Segments like this may play well to the public’s desire for optimism but they don’t present an accurate assessment of future oil production in the Bakken Shale region or in the U.S.

Energy – Dec 23

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– Former oil expert from the IEA: decline of ‘all liquids’ soon after 2015 (in French)
– Nigeria on alert as Shell announces worst oil spill in a decade
– Shelling out the Oil in Waters off Nigeria: Radar Satellite Image December 21, 2011
– Oil Workers Rise Up in Kazakhstan, Face Brutal Crackdown
– MIT: The Chinese Solar Machine

Oil and geopolitics: a turbulent year, and no end in sight

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Kazakhstan is moving fast to pacify its restive west as a new video circulates in which police shoot and beat retreating oil workers protesting labor conditions. Two reasons: With parliamentary elections three weeks away, President Nursultan Nazarbayev (pictured above) wants to stamp out any political narrative conflicting with his long-time assertion of keeping Kazakhstan stable. Abroad, the jittery global oil market is already starting to factor in a possible disruption of Kazakhstan’s 1.5 million barrels a day of oil exports

The peak oil crisis: 2012 – apocalypse now?

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A case can be made that some very bad things might be coming in the next year or so. There would seem to be two fundamental problems behind the coming upheavals. One is that we are running into constraints on resources and the other is that the OECD nations have simply accumulated so much debt that it is unlikely to ever be repaid.

No one ever thinks of the atmosphere’s ability to absorb and carry off carbon emissions as a resource, but as the world’s climate changes for the worse, that is exactly what it is. It could easily turn out over the course of the next 10 decades, that the atmosphere’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases turns out to be far more important than reserves of fossil fuels.

Land Rights and the Rush For Land Report (excerpt)

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Originated by the rising concerns expressed by many International Land Coalition (ILC) members in 2008, the Commercial Pressures on Land research project is intended to go beyond the large-scale land acquisitions phenomenon, focussing on the wider set of converging drivers for investment interest in land, such as rising food consumption and predicted long-term food prices rises; demand for feedstock for agrofuels; increasing commodity prices; carbon-trading mechanisms such as REDD; and rent seeking and speculation practices on land by recontextualising them within longer term trends.

Massacre of oil workers in Kazakhstan

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– NYT: Defying Police Crackdown, Kazakh Protests Continue
– The Massacre Everyone Ignored: Up To 70 Striking Oil Workers Killed In Kazakhstan By US-Supported Dictator
– Kazakhstan: Riots Not Prelude to Arab Spring
– Seeing Revolution Everywhere: the ‘Kazakhstan Spring’ That Isn’t

Deep thought – Dec 20

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– It Begins: Dogs and cats use public transport to commute to food
– Avoiding bad news is not going to solve the world’s problems
– Transition And Transformation: The Joy Of Preparation (video with Carolyn Baker and Andrew Harvey)
– John Bellamy Foster: Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe
– Ted Trainer: The problem is consumer-capitalism

OPEC says, ‘Don’t count on us’ for more supply

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The results of OPEC’s latest meeting to set oil production quotas were announced this morning. Instead of production targets for individual countries, a group production ceiling of 30 million barrels a day was set. This amount is a bit less than OPEC produced in November 2011 (actual 30.367 mbd), according to its reckoning, and less than it would have produced most of 2011, if Libyan production had stayed on line, based on the amounts shown in its November Oil Market Report.

Demanding less: why we need a new politics of energy (report excerpt)

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For generations, human development has been fuelled by ever greater amounts of energy. The discovery of fire by our earliest ancestors allowed them to harness the energy stored in plants to keep warm and to cook. Agriculture is essentially a means of diverting sunlight into crops to provide easily accessible food. Farming liberated people from the daily hunt for sustenance, and allowed populations to grow. Exploitation of coal fuelled the industrial revolution and the development of urban societies. Oil for transport, and the development of electricity systems enabled modern society, with its ever increasing consumption and mobility. Energy use and social progress have been inextricably linked. Until now. Now, it makes sense to use less energy, not more.