Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This week saw further confirmation that all is not well in the shale gas industry as ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson admitted “We are all losing our shirts today.”…”We’re making no money. It’s all in the red.” The news comes as little surprise since the price of production is estimated to be around $4-7/per million BTUs and prices have been languishing around $2…
Oil, natural gas, and alternatives dominate the headlines when it comes to energy. But there’s a big and largely-overlooked revolution occurring with the energy source likely to become the most preferred fuel for a world in economic decline: coal.
Svenska Dagbladet, one of the largest newspapers in Sweden, has now made a review of the book Peeking at Peak Oil (read the article in Swedish). In a special note they have compared the predictions that Matt Simmons made for Saudi Arabia and the predictions in the new book Peeking at Peak Oil.
-Exxon: ‘Losing Our Shirts’ on Natural Gas
-Shale Gas Reality Begins to Dawn
-The Sky Is Pink: New Josh Fox Video On Fracking Controversies in New York (and Much More)
-Obama’s Interior chief: State regulation of fracking ‘not good enough for me’
-Ed Davey urged to take ‘foot off the gas’ and focus on renewables [Report]
-Gazprom Biggest Loser As Shale Gas Upends World Markets
As researchers at Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) joined 32,000 other Coloradans in fleeing the fires, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations about the “manageable” risks of climate change. “… “As a species that’s why we’re all still here: we have spent our entire existence adapting. So we will adapt to this,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.”
– Has The Peak Oil Idea… Peaked? If so, does the planet stand a chance?
– Oil: the party is over, says OpenMind AM
– Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson: The New North American Energy Paradigm: Reshaping the Future
– Australia’s growing oil imports are an energy security issue
– 10 mouse clicks to calculate Australian crude oil depletion of 83 per cent
As many Americans retreat to air-conditioned environments to get out of the heat, the flame increases under our limited freshwater resources. The electrical energy used to create our comfort zones requires massive withdrawals of water from our rivers, lakes and aquifers to cool down nuclear, coal and natural gas power plants.
Global oil consumption increased by 0.7 percent in 2011 to reach an all-time high of 88.03 million barrels per day, according to new research conducted by the Worldwatch Institute for its Vital Signs Online service. This rate of increase was considerably slower than in 2010, when oil consumption rose by 3.3 percent following a decline of 1.3 percent in 2009 due to the global financial crisis.
There’s an interesting divergence between the extreme complexity of the predicament that besets contemporary industrial civilization, on the one hand, and the remarkable simplicity of the failures of reasoning that have sent us hurtling face first into that predicament, on the other. Nearly all of those failures share a common root, which is the inability—or at least the unwillingness—of most people in the modern world to pay attention to the natural cussedness of whole systems.
– Peak-Oil is now! (true but there is some delay due to unconventional oil and gas)
– Plateau Oil now! (true, since 2005 at just above 80 Mb/d, but not for very much longer as the potentials of unconventional oil and gas are extremely limited)
– The precise moment of PO is not so important anymore, as we are probably already at or closely before the peak according to many.
[Great summary]
Oil production capacity is surging in the United States and several other countries at such a fast pace that global oil output capacity is likely to grow by nearly 20 percent by 2020, which could prompt a plunge or even a collapse in oil prices, according to a new study by a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School (Leonardo Maugeri, a former oil industry executive).
– The Potential Upside of Captivity
– The Death of Petro-State Risk
– Is Peak Oil Dead?
– Dave Cohen: Should We Still be Concerned with Peak Oil?
