Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Any production numbers for OPEC are subject to the key question: net or gross? This pattern, of domestic oil demand increasing much faster than production, is common to far more than 9 out of 10 oil producers, both OPEC and nonOPEC. Net exports, therefore, will always tend to grow slower than national production.
Prices of crude oil could surge to as high as 80 dollars a barrel within the next two years but such a level would not last long, OPEC’s acting secretary general was quoted as saying.
Our Government is well aware of Peak Oil thus the 5% Petrol Tax is an underhanded market signal. A signal that alternatives need to be developed to our energy hungry, drive in utopia, recreational shopping lifestyles.
Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), Mexico’s state oil monopoly, said it expects production at its Cantarell oil field to begin declining this year, earlier than previously forecast.
Cantarell is the largest oil field in Mexico, and the eighth largest in the world. The field, which has been in production since 1979, had produced 2.11 million barrels per day in 2004. Pemex expects that to decline by 5% to 2.0 mbpd in 2005.
General Norman Schwarzkopf, who led the 1991 attack on Iraq, told the US Congress in 1990: “Middle East oil is the West’s lifeblood. It fuels us today, and being 77% of the free world’s proven oil reserves, is going to fuel us when the rest of the world runs dry.”
Latest figures from the oil industry have confounded expert predictions of a price fall in the last two months. As prices have remained above $50 a barrel, Opec’s statements in particular have come under close scrutiny.
The Uncle John’s 2005 voyage is part of a wider effort to better understand methane hydrate. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has funded the Gulf of Mexico Joint Industry Project, a 4-year, $13.6 million, cost-shared effort to develop technologies that locate and safely drill through or near the hydrate.
Startling press release regarding a recently completed study of oil peak responses. Full report not yet received, but apparently claims all alternatives are incapable of meeting demand in the short term and argues that efficiency measures and drastic scaling up of production of substitute fuels is required.
…the nuclear arms race was a lot more straightforward than its emerging post-Cold War successor: the energy race. It’s a similarly brutal zero-sum game, but one characterized by an ever-shifting web of opportunistic, cross-cutting allegiances that make the nuclear world order appear pleasantly tidy and predictable by comparison.
…the global oil peak implies that all the nations of the world will have less total energy to divvy up. I just don’t see where the United States is in a particularly favorable position on this. Have you heard of any plans to reduce our extreme dependence on cars? …Are we going to subcontract the Jolly Green Giant to go around America moving things closer together so we don’t have to burn so much gasoline?
The prime ministers of Ukraine and Georgia said Monday that the flow of oil in a key Ukrainian pipeline would be reversed, a decision certain to complicate the two former Soviet republics’ already tense relations with Russia.
What was the biggest oil story in 2004? I posed this question to all the Simmons & Company oil experts this year. Oil prices in 2004 were on almost everyone’s list. Even “Peak Oil” got votes – a topic that received more media attention, during 2004, by a substantial margin than ever before.
