Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
If you live on the Gulf Coast, welcome to the real world of oil — and just know that you’re not alone. In the Niger Delta and the Ecuadorian Amazon, among other places, your emerging hell has been the living hell of local populations for decades.
Two regular contributors clash: oilpatch engineer Martin B. Payne and long-time peak oil activist and writer, Jan Lundberg, publisher of Culture Change. In this article, Martin Payne steps back and gives full voice to “the enlightened fossil fuel professional.” Interestingly, the dividing line between activist and oilman is not as sharp as first appears.
– FT: Wall St and peak oil
– BP and the peak: delusions of oil grandeur persist
– ASPO-USA vs Lovins: Optimism, harsh realism, and blind spots — 10 years later
– The Nation: Kicking the oil habit
BP has reported that its latest attempt to cap the leak at its Macondo well has stopped the flow of oil into the ocean. The news has so far been greeted with cautious optimism while integrity testing on the cap continues. The development comes at the end of another torrid week for BP…
A midweed roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-The Oil Market Report
Luke Skywalker had to master the ways of the Force to save the galaxy. We face a similar challenge — mastering the ways of energy, which are surprisingly counterintuitive to people raised in current ways of thinking — in order to make use of the limited options still open to us in an age of declining energy supplies.
On July 12th, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar issued a “Decision memorandum regarding the suspension of certain offshore permitting and drilling activities on the Outer Continental Shelf.”
-Why the tech revolution isn’t a template for an energy revolution
-Right Wing Thought Police – An Analysis
-The Iranian Threat
-U.S. ads call for Alberta boycott
-Population explosion scrutinised as scientists urge politicians to act
-US Company Set to Ship Billions of Gallons of Water from Alaska to India
-The Drowned World
It’s quite nearly universally accepted that the easy-to-reach, cheap oil has been extracted – but is this also the case with Canada’s much-touted oil sands? The startling suggestion has been made by economist and author Jeff Rubin, blogging on the Globe and Mail business pages. He writes that the price of oil must rise in order for Albertan oil to be economically sustainable, as future expansion will be chasing supplies buried deeper underground and further from the available water supply.
Let us imagine human beings climbing up a rather steep and precarious tree, boosted up by fossil energies into a place we simply could never get to without them. The problems we are facing right now all originate in our fundamental inability to voluntarily set limits – that is, at no point did most of us even recognize the basic necessity of stopping at a point at which we could get down on our own, without our petrocarbon helpers.
At just before 10 p.m. on Tuesday, April 20, 2010, the Transocean Ltd.-owned and BP Plc.-operated floating oil rig Deepwater Horizon was boring an exploratory well in the Macondo Prospect—about 40 miles southeast of the Louisiana coast and nearly a mile underwater—when it exploded without warning from a well blowout. …BP has tried repeatedly to stop the flow, to no avail. (As of this writing on Tuesday evening, July 13, it remains to be seen whether the well cap installed last night, a Band-Aid pending completion of the long-awaited relief wells next month, will actually work.) The spill’s magnitude has beggared description or belief.
