Fossil Fuels

How you can tell that the peak oil debate is (almost) over

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Far from being discouraged by the rash of peak oil denunciations in the media lately, I am invigorated by it. Remember: we’re now on offense; they’re on defense. The opposition has to explain why oil production has been flat since 2005 despite high prices. And, the twisted logic and demonstrably false assertions they offer will provide ever better opportunities to trump them again and again.

Peak oil – Feb 18

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– NPR: Ex-Shell CEO and Peak Oil Researcher Face Off Over America’s Energy Future
– WaPo: Has the United States beaten peak oil? Not so fast.
– Much ado about Hotelling: Beware the ides of Hubbert (Hubbert curve is a major determinant for oil prices)
– ¿Cuánto petróleo hace falta para extraer un barril de petróleo? (Charles Hall intervista)
– Roland Vially, géologue à l’IFP : “les hydrates de méthanes pourraient constituer une nouvelle source de gaz à l’horizon 2030”

How reliable are U.S. Department of Energy oil production forecasts?

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No individual or organization is always going to be right when it comes to projections of future oil production. What we should expect is that in general, an individual or organization should more often than not be within some reasonable range of the actual future production level. Unfortunately, the U.S. DOE/EIA’s projections are too frequently off by a substantial amount.

Peak Oil and the Importance of EROI (review of Fleeing Vesuvius, Part 2)

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Obviously getting by without fossil fuels (owing to impending shortages of oil, natural gas and coal) will be an incredibly rude shock for all of us. Our current telecommunication, transportation and retail infrastructure, as well as our current system of industrial agriculture, are based on the abundant availability of cheap fossil fuels. On the plus side, Fleeing Vesuvius is full of a number of specific strategies, currently being tried in Ireland and elsewhere, for building resilient communities to withstand this transition to a non-fossil energy society.

World energy consumption – beyond 500 exajoules

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Today’s post goes into the global consumption of energy and provides a dataset in Excel for researchers on global primary energy consumption from 1830 to 2010. We are now burning 10 times as much energy as a century ago to provide the goods and services we consume. Energy consumption is still increasing rapidly

 

‘Breathing new life into the concept of resilience’: the notes from my ‘Four Thought’ talk

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I wondered whether in seeing resilience just as something we do in order to be prepared for a crisis, we were missing a trick: that we might instead see it as an opportunity. How might our settlements look if we began to think in terms of resilient food, resilient energy, resilient economies? Might this shift in thinking actually contain the potential for an economic and cultural renaissance for the places we live? It felt to me to be a powerful question.

Fossil fuels: I’m not dead yet

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Having looked at the major alternatives to fossil fuel energy production (summarized here), we come away with the general sentiment that the easy days of cheap energy are not evidently carried forward into a future without fossil fuels. That’s right, fossil fuels will be dead and gone. Is it time to pile them on the cart to be hauled away?

The imperial way: American decline in perspective, Part 2

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While the principles of imperial domination have undergone little change, the capacity to implement them has markedly declined as power has become more broadly distributed in a diversifying world. Consequences are many. It is, however, very important to bear in mind that — unfortunately — none lifts the two dark clouds that hover over all consideration of global order: nuclear war and environmental catastrophe, both literally threatening the decent survival of the species.