Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Despite the plans of major electricity users around the world to pull away from nuclear power after Fukushima, Saudi Arabia has announced that it’s planning to start building power reactors at a breakneck pace. This could be yet another sign that Matt Simmons was right about the Saudi oil peak, signalling the beginning of the end of the Oil Age. But we have to wonder if the Oil Sheiks can control their new atomic toy.
In thousands of ways, UN policy helps shape how we respond to emerging crises, from basic poverty to world political events, from food to climate change and population. What is emerging, however, is that UN analyses are increasingly diverging from reality – as they attempt to describe our future, they have failed to adequately (or at all) take into account that most basic of all considerations, material limits on energy resources.
I was recently asked to participate in an energy roundtable at Focus on China’s Energy Future and the Shale Gas Question. It is no secret that I feel that China’s moves stand to continue sending shock waves through the energy markets over the upcoming years. In fact, energy news from China warranted inclusion in My Top 10 Energy Stories of both 2009 and 2010. In 2009, I stated my belief that “China will be the single-biggest driver of oil prices over at least the next 5-10 years.” In 2010, the news was reported by the International Energy Administration (IEA) that China had become the world’s top energy consumer. BP confirmed this in their just-released Statistical Review of World Energy 2011.
A veteran anti-corporate campaigner, Michael Brune is not your ordinary environmentalist. And now that’s he’s in charge, America’s oldest and largest green group is no longer your father’s Sierra Club. So it’s no surprise that his book “Coming Clean,” re-released after the Deepwater Horizon spill, presents peak oil as a major energy challenge. But as a big fan of the green economy, Brune is more optimistic than many peak oil writers about the ability of solar, wind and other renewables to replace oil and coal. Is he right?
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) will meet today June 8 in Vienna to talk about increasing oil production. Preliminary news reports are hinting at Kuwait and Saudi Arabia pushing for a 1.5 million barrels per day increase in production to cool off oil prices. West Texas Intermediate oil is currently a little below $100 a barrel, but most other blends are above $100 per barrel. Iran, Venezuela, and Iraq oppose the increase.
Members of OPEC will agree to increase their official production today, but that won’t do much to lower prices — the plenitude of energy-related stress across the globe underscores more than ever how power has dispersed out of OPEC’s hands. It’s not only the civil war in Libya, and the loss of its 1.4 million barrels a day of oil exports, or the chaos in Yemen. From the South China Sea to Alberta, Canada, tempers are flared over the control and movement of oil.
Whenever a salmon, bear, lodgepole or Dow Jones company spends more energy on an activity than they get back, death follows. Or in corporate terms, debt builds and things fall apart.
As supply and demand factors increasingly point to a future in which natural gas plays a greater role in the global energy mix, the International Energy Agency (IEA) on Monday released a special report exploring the potential for a “golden age” of gas. The new report, part of the World Energy Outlook (WEO) 2011 series, examines the key factors that could result in a more prominent role for natural gas in the global energy mix, and the implications for other fuels, energy security and climate change.
People that worry about the peaking of global oil supplies often use symmetrical curves as simple models for how production will peak and then decline, with logistics and Gaussians being popular choices. This goes back to M. King Hubbert (and I’ve done some of this myself). The United States is the poster child for this kind of analysis, since this region was the first to be developed at scale and production peaked in 1970. However, it seems increasingly clear that the US production curve is far from symmetrical (perhaps driven by higher prices since the 1970s, and especially in the 2000s). Using data from the EIA for production and reserves, we can see that the decline side is slower than the growth side for both.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-China
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
This note aims at exploring the scientific foundations and therefore the scope of validity of these forecasting techniques. Looking at the basic assumptions of Hubbert’s thesis, it concludes that these techniques should not be used to forecast neither the peak (or plateau) of the annual production rate, nor the ultimate reserves of any mineral, unless given exceptional conditions.
