No bell curve in the jaws of peak oil
Hold on to your hat! There will be no smooth descent from the worldwide peak.
Fossil Fuels
Copenhagen Is Supposed to Fail. DIY!
Much passionate concern is flying around regarding the United Nations meeting on climate this December in Copenhagen. We hear it from honest activists and from politicians who sound trustworthy on this most crucial matter. An example is Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of Great Britain, who deserves a prize for eloquence in warning us of climate change.
Peak oil review – Oct 26
A weekly review including:
– Production and prices
– Copenhagen
– Oil and Money Conference
– Quote of the Week
– Briefs
Oil and the Future–A lunchtime address by John Hess
Our industry is at a crossroads. In the past few years, oil supply has struggled to keep pace with demand. But the financial crisis has reduced demand by 2 million barrels per day, creating excess inventories and lower prices. But once economic growth recovers, it is likely we will return to the market conditions of one year ago. The price of $140 per barrel oil was not an aberration; it was a warning.
Insights Regarding Future World Oil Production Based on ASPO Denver Presentations
“Peak oil can be a very tricky topic, the way I talk about it and deal with it at the end of the day is: We need to revolutionize the way we consume and produce energy… We need to really be the leaders in saying: the future for our children and our grandchildren as far as energy consumption and as far as production, it looks like this” with those words Colorado Governor Bill Ritter started his closing speech at the ASPO conference in Denver that took place from 10 to 12 October 2009.
Resource nationalism: The last stand for the oil optimists
The price of oil has more than doubled from its nadir of $30 a barrel earlier this year. To explain the resilience of oil prices in the face of a severe economic slump, the oil optimists have turned to an old standby argument: resource nationalism.
ODAC Newsletter – Oct 23
This week ODAC welcomes the publication of two important reports. In its excellent Heads in the Sand report, Global Witness provides one of the clearest summaries of the peak oil issue to date, including a trenchant critique of the IEA’s position…
The Peak Oil Crisis: More Reports
The main conclusion of the British report is that there is a “significant risk” that conventional oil production will peak before 2020, and that forecasts which delay the event beyond 2030 are based on assumptions that are “at best optimistic and at worst implausible.”
Peak oil notes – Oct 22
A weekly review including:
– Production and prices
– Iraq
Food & agriculture – Oct 22
-A New Direction on Research at the USDA? The Experts Weigh In
-USDA and EPA Pushing Coal Ash for Growing Crops
-‘We need to pay farmers … to protect nature’
-Economic crisis exposes fragile global food system, new UN report says
Reserves and Production: A Simple Example (based on Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia)
So far in this series of technical talks, I have tried to explain some of the pieces that have to be put together to get crude oil or natural gas out of the ground. I intend to go on with the series in the coming weeks, but thought that today I would put some of the different thoughts that I have talked about recently together. So I am going to talk a little about reserve calculations and production and will use an example to show how the numbers are derived. And again, let me stress that this is a very simplified example. It is also only somewhat fictionalized, as I shall comment at the end.
Comments on Scientific American’s “Squeezing more oil from the ground”
A decade ago, Scientific American published the seminal article by these two luminaries of the Peak Oil awareness movement, that relaunched the debate on M. King Hubbert’s finds, Scientific American appears now as a completely different publication. Now, however, scientific content doesn’t seem to be a requisite for its articles. Among other eerie details, Leonardo Maugeri goes as far as citing “Common Wisdom” to present erroneous facts.
