Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In the late 1800s northwestern Ohio was at the center of an oil boom as the state became the nation’s largest crude producer. Today Ohio is at the center of another fossil fuel boom, where a new drilling method — hydraulic fracturing (fracking) combined with modern horizontal drilling — is releasing natural gas from deep underground shale, leading to a rush of new leases. Is drilling safe or are contamination concerns unfounded?
-IEA’s golden rules for gas are missed opportunity
-Campaigners’ anger over agency’s shale gas report
-Using shale gas over coal does not help climate, says big gas investor
-Shale play a worry for Bexar ozone
Jeff Rubin is currently touring his new book, The End Of Growth. As the former Chief Economist for CIBC World Markets he brings an intimate knowledge of financial markets and how they work to the peak oil/end of growth community populated by other venerable thinkers such as Richard Heinberg, Chris Martenson and John Michael Greer.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The EU crisis
-Iran
-Retail gasoline prices
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
National security expert Michael Klare believes the struggle for the world’s resources will be one of the defining political and environmental realities of the 21st century. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, he discusses the threat this scramble poses to the natural world and what can be done to sustainably meet the resource challenge.
The world is clearly reaching many limits. What limits are the human and natural systems reaching now?
Oil pundits and politicians are pushing the idea of United States energy independence due largely to the current boom in hydraulic fracturing. But behind the rhetoric, is there any truth to these claims?
Contrary to the views of some ill-informed journalists and politicians, there are many places where the international momentum is swinging rapidly towards — not away from — a swift transition to a post-carbon economy.
G8 leaders meeting last weekend in Camp David will have been cheered by the recent slide in oil prices – albeit that the weakening in price is largely a consequence of the increasingly dire economic news. Nevertheless the group issued a statement to the effect that should the price start heading back in the other direction they will be calling on the IEA to take action…
Whenever the U.S. supply of imported oil is threatened with interruption (or if the U.S. economy should recover much), the global marketplace bids up the oil price, and the politically sensitive price of gasoline will rise in step and depress consumer spending. Whenever the world oil price is high enough, it can cause an economic crisis. In this case global demand may contract sharply, as it did in 2009. The price can never rise for long above what the global oil market can bear.
Between January 2002 and August 2008, the nominal oil price rose from $19.7 to $133.4 a barrel. This led to a large increase in oil revenues for oil exporters and a deterioration of the current account for oil importers. Between 2002 and 2006, net capital outflows from oil exporters grew by 348%, becoming the largest global source of net capital outflows in 2006 (McKinsey 2007).
Capital outflows from oil exporters therefore played an important role in the global liquidity glut during the build-up to the US subprime crisis.
There’s been a lot of excitement in the past year over the rise of North American oil production and the promise of increased oil production across the whole of the Americas in the years to come. National security experts and other geo-political observers have waxed poetic at the thought of this emerging, hemispheric strength in energy supply. What’s less discussed, however, is the negligible effect this supply swing is having on lowering the price of oil, due to the fact that, combined with OPEC production, aggregate global production remains mostly flat.
But there’s another component to this new belief in the changing global landscape for oil: the dawning awareness that OPEC’s power has finally gone into decline.
