Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– US military warns oil output may dip causing massive shortages by 2015 (Guardian)
– Will peak copper haunt us before peak oil?
– Energy Secretary Chu’s optimistic view of energy future at EIA conference
– German study quantifies speculative premium in crude prices
– Horse-drawn Hummer
U. S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood may soon be nominated for heresy-of-the-year award for an impromptu speech at the 2010 National Bike Summit last month. In that speech he said federal transportation policy will no longer favor automobiles over bicyclists and walkers. As anyone who regularly rides a bicycle knows, this change is big precisely because automobiles and bicycles share much of the same infrastructure. But this very fact may bode ill for the bicycle in a post-oil future.
Improved job creation data in the US along with strong Asian demand led to a run on oil prices this week taking the price of a barrel beyond $87 and out of the ‘goldilocks’ $70-$80 territory of recent months. Forecasts for the rest of the year are all over the board…
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Droughts
-Eruption in Kyrgzstan
One of the world’s foremost educators on Peak Oil, Richard Heinberg, in an exclusive interview for MMNews: “We are currently seeing the end of economic growth as we have known it.” Further on, he talks about the financial / economic crisis, monetary changes vis-à-vis a shrinking energy supply, and the Century of Declines: “Peak Everything.”
In this final installment of the Minimum EROI series we calculate the minimum EROI required from our energy sources to support the current transportation infrastructure of the U.S.
Now, if you are wondering why a falling water level in the Venezuelan highlands should be if interest to Americans, the answer is easy. Despite years of political tensions between the Chavez government and Washington, the U.S. is still importing some 800,000 barrels a day of crude from Venezuela.
– Blood on the streets in Kyrgyzstan revolt
– Upheaval in Kyrgyzstan as leader flees
– Kyrgyzstan at the hub of superpowers’ plans
– Bloodshed on streets of Kyrgyzstan as government cracks down on protesters
– The Pentagon also expects an imminent oil shock
– Peak oil man [Colin Campbell] shifts focus to peak price, demand
– DECC start to ‘get’ peak oil… or maybe not
– Saudi Arabia’s crucial role in the crude price outlook
As a subscriber to the Oil & Gas Journal, lots of email alerts roll into my inbox. But sometimes there’s a missive startling enough to actually get my attention. This is one of those times.
I was very struck by a piece by Steve Randy Waldmann at Interfluidity yesterday, entitled Capital Can’t be Measured. He is basically arguing that modern financial institutions are sufficiently complex that the concept of their “capital” is subject to measurement errors of the same order of magnitude as the capital itself. This rang true to me, and put into words something that had nagged at me in reading about financial reforms, but had not come clearly to the surface of mind.
When I began writing about peak oil professionally in 2006, it was generally considered a tinfoil hat theory. The notion that oil production might peak around 2012, plus or minus, was only taken seriously by a few analysts who were considered extremely pessimistic.
