Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
How reliable is EIA forecasting about oil supplies and prices? Only an investigation into how it is done allows us to answer these questions. Some digging reveals that there is little reason to trust EIA prognostications.
I regard much of this gloom and doom as vastly overdone. But we should admit that, in the first decade of the 21st Century, those of us who work in the energy industry are at the very centre of the challenges which the world faces. It is not a comfortable position. Yet we should rise to those challenges wisely, confidently and rationally.
Interview with former CIA director James Woolsey. “The war on terror is the only war the United States has fought, with the obvious exception of the civil war, in which we pay for both sides. This is not a good plan. This current year we will borrow something on the order of $320 billion dollars, nearly a billion dollars a day, to import oil.”
Speech to the U.S. House: “Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of our nuclear navy, gave an amazingly prophetic speech 50 years ago. He noted that we have 8,000 years of recorded history and discussed the extraordinary contribution of energy, particularly oil, to the development of civilization. However, Adm. Rickover noted that oil and all fossil fuels are finite resources that once burned are gone forever.”
Calif. Inst. of Technology researcher: “Hubbert’s peak, coal, and climate change”
ODAC News
Petrol problems about peak oil, not snake oil
4 takes on oil demand, supply and disruption
BP Energy Review: World has enough oil for 40 years
A simple observation – or why peak will be earlier than most people expect: “Global production falls when loss of output from countries in decline exceeds gains in output from those that are expanding.” (Slide presentation by the editor of Petroleum Review.)
Historic coal peaks (peak coal)
Newcastle ‘to lose 2m tonnes in coal’
Full fields, empty tanks
Time growers got on path of sustainability
World Day Against Child Labour Focuses On Agriculture
Gardeners, beware of the plastic beast
Rooftop farming taking root
An executive summary of weekly news from a peak oil perspective.
Huge and growing reserves figures are published in respected oil industry journals which then make their way into the mainstream media. The figures are essentially worthless.
Strahan has produced a thoroughly researched and compelling book to add to the growing pile of publications on the coming energy crises, one of the best since Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over
One cannot separate fossil fuel depletion from global warming. Although both of these evil twins will force us humans to curb our consumption of fossil fuels, how we chose to utilize – and stretch out – and allocate our remaining resources is a critical element of any global plan.
