Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
When I began writing about peak oil professionally in 2006, it was generally considered a tinfoil hat theory. The notion that oil production might peak around 2012, plus or minus, was only taken seriously by a few analysts who were considered extremely pessimistic.
-Dash for Poland’s gas could end Russian stranglehold
-Natural-Gas Data Overstated
-BP fights to limit controls on shale gas drilling
– Officials Wake Up to Peak Oil
– TOD’s Dave Murphy on “This Week in Energy”
– What’s driving up oil prices again? Wall Street, of course
– Oil and gas ads target ‘energy industry taxes’
-Drill, baby, drill: The myth of energy independence
-Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling for First Time
-Expect a new peak for oil next year
-So Much for Peak Demand… Try 134mb/d by 2030
The sparkling, sanitized waterfront of Cardiff, Wales, reveals barely a hint of the country’s grimy industrial past. Where one of the busiest ports anywhere once shipped Welsh coal out into the world, a complex of upscale shops, pubs, and restaurants now dominates the area. Out are the sailors, brothels, and seedy watering holes. In are tourist-friendly pubs, fusion restaurants with names like ffresh, and a circus carousel. The locally favored Brains brewery (“People who know beer have Brains”) has survived nearby.
In the years leading up to the crash of the Housing Bubble in 2006 and the subsequent financial meltdown in 2008, there was no shortage of people telling us America’s continued prosperity was not in jeopardy. All that talk was nonsense, of course. In 2010, the situation is eerily similar in the natural gas business. We are told that we have 100 years of supply, implying that we will still be producing cheap shale gas long after the oceans are devoid of fish. As in the pre-Housing Bubble days, a few skeptics are crying foul. There are underground rumblings that things are not on the up & up with shale gas.
I think we can solve this problem. If we look at it from an engineering or technical perspective, we have solutions in hand that we can build out in the next decade that would reduce our carbon dramatically. We could double our nuclear, we could double our natural gas for electric power, ramp up wind and solar dramatically while cutting back our coal use 80 percent…Just because we could do it as engineers with off-the-shelf technology that exists today within a decade does not mean that the policy, economic, or cultural hurtles are not real.
Gazprom, the largest natural gas company in the world, is experiencing a moment of truth. And so, by extension, is Russia, which has relied on the behemoth for a large part of its tax revenue, and as a spearpoint of its foreign policy. The main ramifications are a shakeup in security presumptions in Europe and on the Caspian Sea, both of which until recently have seemed to be under Gazprom’s thumb.
DARK OPTIMISM How do we handle Peak Oil AND climate change? Shaun Chamberlin from UK Transition Towns, energy writer Kurt Cobb, plus Richard Heinberg on renewable hope, with Lester Brown.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Venezuela’s Power Crisis
-UK Peak Oil Summit
Earlier this week, the UK Telegraph reported: Oil reserves ‘exaggerated by one third’
The world’s oil reserves have been exaggerated by up to a third, according to Sir David King, the Government’s former chief scientist, who has warned of shortages and price spikes within years.
Oil supply optimists often say that the application of enhanced oil recovery techniques to existing and future wells will vastly expand oil reserves and oil production. The trouble is these techniques aren’t new, and they are already being widely applied. That means current oil reserves and production already reflect any effect they have had.
