Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Joseph Tainter and Tadeusz Patzek are authors of a soon-to-be-released book called”Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma.” This book is not simply the story of the Gulf oil spill (although it does tell this story, quite well). Tainter and Patzek use the story of Gulf oil spill as the background for discussing the energy-complexity spiral, and its relationship to this accident.
Daniel Yergin, whom the media have consistently designated as one of the world’s premier experts on energy matters–and who has a consistent track record of predicting higher oil production levels–has been very visible of late, especially with a in the Wall Street Journal, focused on why concerns about Peak Oil are misplaced. I thought that it would be useful to review how some of Mr. Yergin’s prior predictions regarding oil prices, production and exports in the 2004/2005 time frame have turned out, now that we have several years of post-2005 price, production and export data. Following is a brief summary.
Even as symptoms of peak oil begin to manifest themselves, the public remains ignorant that stringency in oil supplies lies at the heart of them (though peak oil is admittedly part of a complex web of problems related to our broader energy and resource use). Why is this so?
From the long view the level of oil production on a graph in this decade may well look like a peak. But from closer in, as we experience it day to day, month to month, and year to year, production may seem to be on a long, bumpy plateau.
“There are no solutions, only responses,” says EHS professor Brian Schwartz, co-director of the Program on Global Sustainability and Health and a nationally recognized expert on the health consequences of peak oil. “You can deny climate change forever, but you can’t deny the rising price of oil. The limitations to ever-increasing production are a geologic reality.”
The coming era of petroleum scarcity is “probably the most underreported issue of our time,” says Schwartz, MD, MS. He and Bloomberg School colleagues have spent much of the past decade looking at how ever-more-costly petroleum will affect some of the key drivers of public health, and what strategies we should adopt now to minimize future health consequences.
– How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia (& Jeffrey Brown’s rebuttal)
– Deepwater Gulf of Mexico: Reserves versus Production
– Cockburn: ‘Peak Oil’ Takes A Deadly Blow
– Winnow out biases in energy issues tome (Yergin review)
The debt crisis and the war in Libya continued their push and pull on the oil price this week with the outlook currently weakening over fears of a Eurozone recession. Despite this Brent continues to trade at over $100/barrel – around double the price at which any previous economic recovery has occurred. The rising cost of energy is playing out in a number of ways…
The film The Last Mountain has it all: a human story of ordinary citizens fighting a soulless and unaccountable coal corporation; an urgency as the last mountain in the Coal River Valley is eyed by Big Coal for surface mining; a history and context for the people’s claim to the rights of the commons; activism in the form of petitioning the government as well as civil disobedience; the role of business, profit, labor and economy as labor power is eroded and corporate profits soar; the eco-system, heritage, and culture of the region; and a new way forward proposed by the people themselves. It’s the best documentary I’ve seen on mountain top removal. But really, it’s about so much more and has come together perfectly as a gestalt, a meme for our times.
The Last Mountain, June 2011, 95 minutes, Dada Films, Directed by Bill Haney.
– “Rome didn’t collapse in a day” – adult comic about one man’s awakening to peak oil
– Is Yergin Correct about Oil Supply? by Gail Tverberg (an Opinion the WSJ did not run)
– Forget about peak oil (Yergin interviewed by “Salon”)
– The UK’s North Sea production declines below 1 million barrel per day
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
The history of energy use in human civilisation is generally summarised as follows: from Antiquity until the start of the Industrial Revolution, people made use of the manual labour of both animals and humans, as well as biomass, sun, water and wind. Next, all these renewable energy sources were replaced by fossil fuels: first coal, and later oil and gas. Uranium completed the picture in the second half of the twentieth century. While this historical summary is basically correct, there were some – rather important – exceptions. Almost all of the Western European economies during the last millenium relied on a large-scale use of fossil fuels such as peat and coal.
– N. American oil output could top 40-year-old peak
– The End of Cheap Uranium
– Peak Phosphorus (video from ABC Australia’s “Catalyst”)
Significant technological advances rarely make eye-catching headlines as they come from many small advances involving numerous scientific disciplines. However, every now and again it becomes clear that progress is being made.
