Fossil Fuels

35 reasons you might want to attend the 2011 ASPO-USA conference

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2. To make your voice heard in Washington about this issue – because we don’t have much time to begin to act, and every person here who says ‘I care deeply about this’ helps reinforce our message of the centrality of this issue.

3, To hear Wes Jackson talk about what we’re going to eat in the coming decades.

4. To get the latest in the emerging story on Shale Gas reality.

5. Because where else can you hear Nicole Foss and Jeff Rubin arguing deflation vs. inflation in the hallways?

6. Because our future depends on getting the word out and we need your help.

7. Because if you want to do with your retirement funds in this economy there are more experts here per square foot than anywhere else.

Peak oil as a thermostat

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Here’s a metaphor that may help in explaining why high oil prices are choking off economic growth for the U.S., and to a lesser extent the rest of the world as well. Think of the oil price as the mercury in a thermostat. As the economy heats up, the mercury expands (oil prices go up). This shuts off the furnace (the factors of production and consumption in the economy that make it grow). As the economy cools, demand for oil contracts and oil prices decline. But with oil now cheap, the factors of production kick in again; this causes oil prices to be bid up, and high prices once again choke off growth.

IEO 2011: a misleadingly optimistic energy forecast by the EIA

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The EIA published International Energy Outlook 2011 (IEO 2011) on September 19, showing energy projections to 2035. One summary stated, “Global Energy Use to Jump 53%, largely driven by strong demand from places like India and China.” It seems to me that this estimate is misleadingly high. The EIA is placing too much emphasis on what demand would be, if the price were low enough. In fact, oil, natural gas, and coal are all getting more difficult (and expensive) to extract.

Clarke’s fallacy

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In an epoch when financial pundits insist that manipulating the arcane symbols we call “money” can materialize petroleum in the bowels of the Earth, and a sizable fraction of Americans seem to think that chanting “Drill baby drill” as a mantra can accomplish the same improbable feat, it’s probably past time to discuss the interface between magic and peak oil. The Archdruid plunges in where rationalists fear to tread, with one word of caution–that word “magic” may not mean what you think it means.

There will be peak oil

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In his article in the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Yergin contradicted his own “There Will Be Oil” mantra by stating that discovery of new fields will be lower in future. With detailed knowledge of the world’s oil production one can actually show that part of Yergin’s discussion supports the fact that we are living in the era of Peak Oil. … The false image of the future that Daniel Yergin described can be compared to trying to steer a supertanker on a journey by only looking in the rearview mirror.

More thoughts on peak oil

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In Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, gave his explanation of what’s wrong with peak oil. Here’s why I don’t find his analysis altogether convincing. … I submit that meeting the growing global demand for crude oil over the last five years has posed significant challenges for the world economy. And those who worry that the next 5-10 years might be like the last should not be dismissed as crackpots.

Peak oil – now or later? a response to Daniel Yergin

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Over the years there has been significant convergence between the peak oil and business-as-usual camps, each hopefully learning from the other. Yergin, whilst attempting to debunk peak oil, appears to have been converted to a late peakist. I can certainly relate to many of the concepts described by Yergin – price influencing supply and demand, technology, innovation and new plays etc – but wonder when these are going to result in new production capacity (supply) that exceeds annual declines?

The stakes are high. Should policy makers listen to Pulitzer Prize winning historians? Or should they listen to geologists and a growing band of economists who can see the dependency of economic growth upon increasing supplies of cheap energy that quite simply do not appear to exist? Most important of all, will the WSJ publish a modified view of the oil world than that presented by Daniel Yergin?