Fossil Fuels

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…

BP’s Thunder Horse to underperform in the wake of the deepwater horizon blowout?

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With BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout in the news, the world’s interest is now focused on deepwater oil production. BP has another deepwater platform in the Gulf of Mexico—Thunder Horse—where it has been working some for some time. My analysis suggests production is not going well as planned at Thunder Horse.

Oil spills — there’s no free lunch

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Here we go again. The tragic explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig and subsequent oil spill has stirred up the usual offshore drilling debate in the United States. Apparently, the Halliburton people had just finished completing the well when something went terribly wrong. Such incidents are relatively rare, and it’s not known what the (over) reaction will be yet.

BBC on the impact of biofuels on Paraguay’s ecology and farmers

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Everyone should listen to this BBC report on the “price of biofuels.” It digs into a key question: what does Europe’s appetite for biodiesel mean for people and ecosystems in the countries that produce the feedstocks?

Peak oil, prices, and supplies – Apr 29

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-Peak at the polls
-Saudi Arabia global oil exports to wane post-2010
-Drilling and spilling for all the oil that’s left
-Gulf oil spill ‘five times’ larger than estimated
-Flight disruptions in Europe a Foretaste for Period of Oil Decline
-The Imminent Crash Of Oil Supply: Be Afraid
-Peak oil predictions

The costs of complexity

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Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies has become one of the most-referenced books in those peak oil circles that have confronted the severity of the predicament the industrial world faces in the age of peak oil. From the offices of Goldman Sachs to the scorched wreckage of Deepwater Horizon on the bottom of the Gulf, an uncomfortable number of today’s iconic news stories are beginning to echo his argument.

Officials wake up to peak oil, part 2

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In the first part of this series, I reviewed a series of reports from March supporting the peak oil view, and warning that world oil production very well may go into terminal decline by 2015 or sooner…On March 25 the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) joined the officially worried, with a report in French newspaper Le Monde titled “Washington considers a decline of world oil production as of 2011.”