Fossil Fuels

Oil Sands: Canada’s 10 ethical challenges

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Canada has joined the ranks of exporting oil nations and now supplies more petroleum to the United States than Mexico or Saudi Arabia. The unconventional character of mined bitumen as well as the startling revenue it generates for government coffers has irrevocably changed the country. Five per cent of the nation’s GDP comes from oil while bitumen makes up 25 per cent of the nation’s exports. As the wild debate about the Keystone XL pipeline illustrates, Canada’s $200-billion energy project has also become a global lightning rod. No oil exporting nation, whether Christian or Muslim, is immune from the corrosive influence of oil money and its dirty politics. Yet Canada has anointed bitumen as the nation’s new “economic engine” without setting clear public policy goals or assessing the economic risks.

Peak oil – Oct 17

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– IEA chides MENA producers to increase output capacity (Jeffrey Brown comments)
– World’s top energy provider is beginning to look beyond oil
– Saudi oil Saudi energy demand to double by 2028
– Irish student newspaper tackles peak oil and climate change

Review of Lieutenant Colonel Fleming’s U.S. Army War College thesis on Peak Oil

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Peak Oil predictions range from the year 2000 to 2100 with the highest concentration of forecasts from 2005 to 2016. Confidence in international oil reserves data is lacking. As such, different forecasters make different assumptions about future undiscovered oil amounts and oil reserves, resulting in a wide range of peak oil estimates. Viewing this wide time disparity in forecasts as problematic, the research objective was to look for an economic cross-check indicator, metric, or alternative data-based means to corroborate or refute existing peak oil estimates.

The peak oil crisis: contagion

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With every passing day it is becoming more apparent that the crisis of the depletion of cheap oil has become deeply enmeshed in the European debt crises. … Concern over the course of the Greek debt crisis has been roiling the foreign exchange and equity markets of late taking oil prices along for a rather wild ride. Last week we had London oil below $100 a barrel, but renewed optimism, or as it is now known, “risk appetite,” soon sent London oil back up over $111 where it continues to methodically eat the heart out of the OECD economies. London oil has now been above $100 a barrel for the last nine months and so far shows no signs of collapsing to the fabled $60 a barrel level as it did three years ago.