The end of oil is closer than you think
Oil production could peak next year, reports John Vidal. Just kiss your lifestyle goodbye. [Long serious piece in a major UK newspaper, featuring Collin Campbell, Chris Skrebowski, etc.]
Oil production could peak next year, reports John Vidal. Just kiss your lifestyle goodbye. [Long serious piece in a major UK newspaper, featuring Collin Campbell, Chris Skrebowski, etc.]
…there’s a sense in which it’s advantageous if the oil peak is earlier. The reason why is it will compel the world, primarily the U.S. here, to move toward something like sustainable energy.
If there’s unbounded amounts of hydrocarbons, we’re just going to destroy the environment for human life or most biological life, so the earlier the peak is, in some respects – yes, it could be catastrophic, it could also be beneficial.
Say you shake a bottle of champagne before opening it, and champagne sprays around and everyone is cheerfully soaked. But if you then put the bottle down, you would see that the gas pressure in the wine, has only pushed out about a third, or less, of the wine out of the bottle. That is, sort of, what happens with an oil well.
It is more than a year since oil prices doubled, but what are the oil companies doing? Some exploration continues but little net increase in refining capacity is planned and most of their effort seems to be going into mergers and takeovers. What do they know that they haven’t told us?
So just who is this super-spike man, and what in the world was he thinking? Well, his name is Arjun Murti, and he’s a veteran oil analyst and a managing director at Goldman. Press-shy by nature anyway, the poor guy was so unsettled by the reaction to his report that he refused all interview requests—until, that is, I was able to persuade him to take my call.
A number of unpublished agreements purportedly signed between the governments of Ukraine and Turkmenistan for the purchase of natural gas have inflamed the conflict between Kyiv and Moscow over natural-gas deliveries from Turkmenistan.
For those wanting to know about the situation in Saudi Arabia or wanting an advance look at Simmons’s book “Twilight In The Desert” or what will likely be his presentation in Edinburgh, this PDF presentation will be of key interest.
“I think they’re [the Saudis] near capacity, and so we’ve just got to get a straight answer from the government as to what they think their excess capacity is,” Bush said, adding that he would not characterize the Saudi production as “flat-out” yet. (updated 21 April)
Britain’s former Energy Minister Brian Wilson will address Peak Oil, and argue that Britain’s current energy policy is “ripe for review”, at a conference in Edinburgh on Monday, 25 April.
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett has discussed global peak oil in a one-half hour taped program, E&E TV.s .On Point,. that is now available via the
Internet in flash video.
The Mexican petroleum giant reports that deepwater deposits in the Gulf of Mexico may be half of what was initially predicted.
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett will discuss the challenge of global peak oil in a one-hour Special Order speech on Tuesday, April 19.