Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Iran was scheduled to inaugurate its long-awaited oil bourse this coming week. However, communication cables have been cut three times, disrupting Web service to portions of the Middle East and Asia. This may impact the bourse. (Links and background)
Exxon Mobil profit sets record again
How oily is your candidate?
Jerome a Paris: BigOil big profits should not be taxed
The oil paradox
In depth report on San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force
Energy Roundtable: Simmons, Hirsch, Rubin
Understanding the current energy crisis in South Africa
Big Oil has trouble finding new fields
Western majors feel the squeeze
Shell feeds doubts about oil industry
Satellite o’er the desert (Saudi oil supply)
IEA refutes ‘peak oil’, points to lack of investment
Minnesota legislators to hear from Simmons
Rifkin: Europe could make the third industrial revolution’
I was involved in one of those periodic discussions that spring up about The Limits To Growth recently and found myself wondering, not for the first time, if other people have read a completely different version of the book to the one I possess.
Coal prices could double again
U.S. scraps ambitious clean-coal power plant (FutureGen)
UK firm wants carbon freedom at new coal-fired plant
SATIS – Egypt (offshore) announced in January 2008 Another gas discovery in a proven area Egyptian oil liquids production peaked in 1993 at just under 950,000 barrels per day, mostly from the Gulf of Suez and the Western Desert. It has been declining by an average of 2.5% per year ever since, despite increasing condensate and natural gas liquids production from its newly developed offshore shallow and deep water gas fields located in the gas-prone Nile Delta.
The discussion at The Oil Drum takes a more personal nature with me; much of my own history involves looking back toward a simpler time in agriculture. (The account of a “recovering energy engineer.”)
Shell’s 108,000 employees earned “an obscene” £14 billion in profits last year.
If, as I imagine, Shell keeps a similar number of contractors off the books to keep the head-count down, the profit per head is about £70k. If you earned £70k as profit in a business, you probably wouldn’t expect to be sand-bagged with a windfall tax by a starving Chancellor.
Within the next ten years the size, shape, efficiency, fuel and numbers of private automobiles is going to undergo a radical change. The nine million gallons of gasoline we currently use in the U.S. each day simply will not be available in the quantities desired at any price.
Dr Jim Buckee has just retired as President and CEO of Talisman Energy, a major independent Canadian oil company with a market capitalisation of $25-billion. On the phone from Perth, Dr Buckee told me that ‘peak oil’ was now either here, or very close.
