Fossil Fuels

China’s coal bubble…and how it will deflate U.S. efforts to develop “clean coal”

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The conventional wisdom in energy-and-environment circles is that China’s economy, which is growing at a rate of eight percent or more per year, is mostly coal powered today and will continue to be so for decades to come…Most of this conventional wisdom is correct, but some of it is plain wrong—so wrong, in fact, that environment-, economic-, and energy-policy wonks are constructing scenarios for the future of U.S. and world energy, and for the global economy, that bear little or no resemblance to the reality that is unfolding.

Industry leaders seem to be showing more openness to energy descent issues

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I’ve spent the last two days at the Institute for the Future’s Ten-Year Forecast retreat in Sausalito, CA…At this retreat, I introduced ideas relating to peak net energy, and the possibility of major changes in the years ahead. I found industry leaders much more open than I had expected to listening to and understanding our energy predicament, and talking about what may be ahead. In this post, I would like to tell you about my experience.

Worse than 1789?

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Senator Levin pretty much had Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein dead in a casket with that now-notorious email from GS’s head of sales and trading, Tom Montag, describing one of their billion-dollar investment “products” as “one shitty deal.” Levin seemed to delight in crossing the boundary into the realm of the unspeakable, knowing that even the so-called “family” newspapers and cable TV networks would have to report it. And just to make sure nobody missed the point, the senator repeated that phrase at least twenty times before the day was over.

Optimism versus reality in peak oil media battle

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The optimists may have long been winning the peak oil media battle – as Matt Simmons observes – but we are beginning to see information coming out on the business pages that allows us to piece together a more balanced story. Right now, much of this focuses on everyone’s favourite cause for optimism, the oil sands…But do the facts support this rampant enthusiasm? I’d suggest not.

Oil spills, crime waves and the increasing militarization of American life

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The involvement of the U. S. military in many civilian tasks seems in some ways logical. But that is just the problem. We are shaping public policies and priorities so that the resources to perform these tasks are increasingly unavailable to the civilian federal agencies or to the state and municipal governments responsible for them. Starved of tax revenue or congressional appropriations, these entities have turned to the military for help.

The peak of oil production is passed

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Dr Michael Lardelli from the University of Adelaide looks at how the bulk of the world’s oil production comes from a relatively small number of very large fields discovered decades ago. The rate of world oil production has been maintained at current levels only by finding and bringing on line an increasing number of smaller fields, but the financial cost and the energy required to find and develop these new fields is constantly increasing. According to Dr Lardelli the so-called peak of oil production was actually in 2008.

ODAC Newsletter – Apr 30

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As oil companies reported sharply increased profits this week, an estimated 5000 barrels of oil a day was spewing into the Gulf of Mexico following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. This ecological disaster comes just a month after President Obama gave the green light to expand drilling off the US coast, and while the timing of the disaster could hardly be worse for big oil’s PR…