Oil

An optimistic diary (for once)

by

I’m usually known as one of the doomers’n’gloomers on the blogs, with diaries and comments on the economy heavily leaning towards negative views. And to a large extent, I still stand by these positions and fully expect (i) the economy to dive again and (ii) an even worse financial crisis coming our way.

I’m also part of the peak oil / peak resources crowd, and do not consider our current civilisation, especially as hundreds of millions in emerging markets rush to embrace it, to be sustainable. … But, surprisingly, I also have a number of arguments to be optimistic for the medium term, i.e. that let me hope that I will not spend my late years in poverty and/or in the middle of societal collapse.

ODAC Newsletter – Aug 27

by

Cairn Energy announced this week that it had found evidence “indicative of an active hydrocarbon system” off Greenland. The news comes in the middle of a bidding round for oil and gas exploration licences there. The US Geological Survey estimated in 2008 that the region contains approximately 90 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, but producing the stuff would combine the extreme challenges of deepwater drilling, extreme cold, and ice. Any accident would be massively harder to deal with than Deepwater Horizon because of the country’s remoteness…

Plotting the coming oil shock

by

A study based on the Hubbert model of peak oil suggests a coming global oil shock may begin as early as 2014 – which ties in with the timeline suggested in a variety of other reports and statements. Despite getting a showing online, and in the occasional business report, [peak oil is] yet to break into the mainstream media. I recently considered three major energy reports published so far in 2010 which take a number of different views on the issue.

Heinberg on peak oil and economic growth & Montpelier’s Village-building Convergence

by

Author Richard Heinberg’s nine books include The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies and Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. He discusses what we know about peak oil, as well as its connection to the end of economic growth.

Natural solidarity

by

A month into BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe, the US press began to say that the crisis might be ‘Obama’s 9/11’. It was a comparison that Obama himself repeated a couple of weeks later. Hyperbole? Perhaps – but the disaster certainly opens up space for thinking about alternatives to the industry that created it.

A crisis of democracy: Real solutions to the BP oil spill

by

For Gulf residents, the BP oil spill has made the problem of unchecked corporate power painfully clear. Exxon Valdez survivor Riki Ott on why this may be the moment to overcome our political divides and take back our democracy.

Save it for the combine

by

I have been visiting A2R Farms outside of Corvallis Oregon all year. They are a former conventional grass seed farm transitioning to organic seed crops, primarily for local distribution. I watched as they planted the fields and as the crops grew–flax, chick peas, sunflowers and wheat. And as harvest season approached I looked over at the combines and asked my friend Clinton Lindsey, “Which one am I driving?”

UK petroleum analyst Michael Smith – interview (1 of 2)

by

“It frustrates me that journalists and even some professionals who should know better are driven by gross reserves numbers when a large part of those reserves won‘t be produced for decades – if they’re produced at all – and have no impact on the financial well-being of a country or company. They really are irrelevant to what will be happening over the next 20 years. Experts in the oil and oil service industries understand this, but I‘m not sure governments who set policy related to energy security and sustainability do”

Major reports point to oil supply turmoil and price volatility

by

Major energy reports published this year are pointing to a significant rise in the price of oil due to supply constraints sometime over the next three years – the only disagreement is how soon.

So far 2010 has seen three international reports considering the future of oil production, demand and prices. These were published by high profile groups that command widespread respect – in turn, a collection of UK industrialists, the US military and a joint effort between Europe’s most recognized insurance company and a politically connected think-tank.

Largely ignored by the media, and considered separately online as they came out, it is interesting to do a compare-and-contrast between documents produced for widely different audiences on each side of the Atlantic.

The simple future beyond oil: The convergence of our economic and ecological futures and the importance of change

by

We are living through “interesting times”; credit crises, recession and rising debt threaten to destabilise nation states. Whilst reckless bankers and traders might have a certain amount of responsibility, if we are to understand the larger processes that are driving these trends we need to stand back and look at the human system as a whole. Change is inevitable – it’s one of the implications of the Laws of Thermodynamics. What we need to understand is the way human ecology works within these natural physical processes, how the contradictions between human systems and these natural processes define what is “unsustainable”, and what this means for our future as we adjust to the natural limitations of our environment.