Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– Jeffrey Brown: Yergin cut his projected rate of increase in total liquids “Capacity” by 70%
– WaPo: What is ‘peak oil,’ anyway?
– Oil’s Most Accurate See No Reverse of Worst Run Since 2008: Energy Markets
– Al-Naimi Says World Oil Market Is Not Oversupplied as Demand Fluctuating
– CSM: Post oil: Glimpses of life after fossil fuel
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
– The 10 Commandments – Guidelines to Surviving in a Post Peak Oil World
– Peak oil advocate Rep. Roscoe Bartlett may be forced out by Maryland redistricting
– Tech Talk – Pipelines in and from Canada
– Exxon’s climate admission
– ‘Fossil fuels are wonderful’, claims US documentary
-Battered by economic crisis, Greeks turn to barter networks
-OSU Urban Farming Study: What’s the Best Way to Turn a Parking Lot into a Garden?
-Earth Sangha announces “Rising Forests Coffee”
-Bath and West Community Energy launch their first public share issue
After I published in “Cassandra’s Legacy” a post titled “The renewable revolution” I was surprised at discovering that many of the commenters reacted negatively to it, taking for granted the fact that renewables, in the form of photovoltaics or wind, “have a low EROEI” and, as a consequence, are unable to exist without a subsidy from fossil fuels. This view has its origins in the 1990s, when it was commonplace to state that “A renewable plant cannot provide enough energy to repay the energy needed to build the plant.” That is, the EROEI of renewables was supposed to be smaller than one.
Perhaps the “low EROEI” of renewables was true in the 1990s, but it is not true any longer.
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.
– 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…
– N. American oil output could top 40-year-old peak
– The End of Cheap Uranium
– Peak Phosphorus (video from ABC Australia’s “Catalyst”)
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
Journalist Mason Inman does what the mainstream media won’t: he gives a balanced, critical look at the claims of energy historian Daniel Yergin about peak oil. (Latest in a series. )
#3 – We’re finding oil faster than we’re using it?
#4 – Only the pessimists have been wrong?
#5 – Peak oil = running out of oil?
Jean Laherrère is co-founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and a retired expert from the French oil company Total. He picks apart the latest analysis from the champion of optimists, the American Daniel Yergin. (Translation of an interview from the French.)
