Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-Tony Hayward’s departure follows that of his mentor
-Researchers Confirm Subsea Gulf Oil Plumes Are From BP Well
-Proceed with caution on shale gas
-Siemens warns growth could fall 7.5pc if energy prices rise
-Is Matt Simmons Credible?
“You have to acknowledge that shale gas is a relatively new and significant contribution to North American supply. But I don’t believe it’s anywhere near the magnitude that is commonly discussed and cited in the press. There are a couple of key points here. First the reserves have been substantially overstated. In fact I think the resource number has been overstated.”
As elsewhere in western Europe, the advanced liberal consumer democracies are ever more unable (politically unwilling) to implement genuine change. Deutschland’s rulers in Berlin firmly believe that techno-managerial innovation (and a hefty dose of financial risk-taking) will continue to provide cures for current ideas of what is unsustainable. As has happened time and again in Europa’s history of nations, from the mid-19th century onwards, the costs of such ‘revolutions’ will be externalised elsewhere (east and south), and the ecological sustainability that Germany’s admirable network of communes have long been admired for will remain out of reach of the country’s policy and practice.
Naresh Giangrande is the co-founder of the world’s first Transition Town, in Totnes, UK. The goal of Transition Towns is to transition from oil dependence to community resilience. He was visiting in Vermont last week, and we’ll here what he had to say about how the project is going back in England, plus what he’s learned from other Transition Towns around the world.
Fossil fuels are currently an essential component in the global economy and the growth of the human population. The fossil fuel production projections from this study suggest that many of the IPCC fossil fuel projections appear overly optimistic. Based on the assumed URR values, it is predicted that global fossil fuel production will peak before 2030. For this reason, it is imperative that appropriate action be taken as early as possible to mitigate the effects of fossil fuel decline, to avoid energy shortages in the near future.
Export of natural gas from Russia to the EU is decisive for the EU’s energy security and a decisive link for the future is the gas pipeline North Stream that will be laid along the bed of the Baltic Sea from a landfall in Vyborg outside St Petersburg to Lybmin in Germany. The pipeline is 1,200,000 meters long and its diameter is 1.2 meters. Using that information I estimate that every pipe segment is 10 meters long. That means that they will weld together 120,000 segments.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The Deepwater Horizon
-Demand projections
-Briefs
-Quote of the week
Lloyd’s hired Chatham House to prepare a white paper on the risks of peak oil called Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic risks and opportunities for business. It seems to me that this new report gets quite a few things right, but it misleads in the direction of thinking things are better than they really are, when it comes to timing and alternatives.
Luke Skywalker had to master the ways of the Force to save the galaxy. We face a similar challenge — mastering the ways of energy, which are surprisingly counterintuitive to people raised in current ways of thinking — in order to make use of the limited options still open to us in an age of declining energy supplies.
At just before 10 p.m. on Tuesday, April 20, 2010, the Transocean Ltd.-owned and BP Plc.-operated floating oil rig Deepwater Horizon was boring an exploratory well in the Macondo Prospect—about 40 miles southeast of the Louisiana coast and nearly a mile underwater—when it exploded without warning from a well blowout. …BP has tried repeatedly to stop the flow, to no avail. (As of this writing on Tuesday evening, July 13, it remains to be seen whether the well cap installed last night, a Band-Aid pending completion of the long-awaited relief wells next month, will actually work.) The spill’s magnitude has beggared description or belief.
Europe is finally starting to think about its longer-term energy issues, and how they affect transportation plans. To try to deal with these issues, a new European Energy Consultation was set up, specifically to look into these issues. The European Energy Consultation asked for interested individuals to provide their input.
When most people think of fossil fuel supplies, they think in terms of barrels of oil, cubic feet of natural gas and tons of coal. But in evaluating how much energy in the form of finite fossil fuels the world has left, these are no longer adequate measurements.
