Oil

Oil sands cannot save us from peak oil

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It’s quite nearly universally accepted that the easy-to-reach, cheap oil has been extracted – but is this also the case with Canada’s much-touted oil sands? The startling suggestion has been made by economist and author Jeff Rubin, blogging on the Globe and Mail business pages. He writes that the price of oil must rise in order for Albertan oil to be economically sustainable, as future expansion will be chasing supplies buried deeper underground and further from the available water supply.

Review: Sound Truth & Corporate Myth$ by Riki Ott

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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.

Chemical dispersants and crude oil – efficacy and toxicity

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One of the striking controversies about the massive BP Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout has been alarm raised about chemical dispersants used to hold spilled crude oil deep in the Gulf of Mexico. Prospects for oil’s direct harm to the environment, the economy, and coastal society were immediately obvious. But why were people so concerned that dispersing the oil was bad—worse than allowing it to come onshore? Is this just a case of “out of sight, out of mind” to benefit the oil company, or are there larger benefits that reduce the harms to other interests?

The peak oil crisis: A mid-year review

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It now appears that the run-away oil well will soon be brought under control and will stop gushing into the Gulf. While the litigation, cleanup, and economic impact of the sub-sea blowout are likely to go on for years, if not decades, the world’s attention will soon shift elsewhere. Even now the economic and employment impact of the administration’s drilling embargo is moving to center stage as attention shifts to the possibility of a US political upheaval at the mid-term elections — now less than four months away.

Our tails get in the way: The problems and principles of energy descent

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Let us imagine human beings climbing up a rather steep and precarious tree, boosted up by fossil energies into a place we simply could never get to without them. The problems we are facing right now all originate in our fundamental inability to voluntarily set limits – that is, at no point did most of us even recognize the basic necessity of stopping at a point at which we could get down on our own, without our petrocarbon helpers.

Planning for Europe’s energy future: My submission to the Commission’s 2010 Consultation on Energy

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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.

New thinking on BP spill: Declare a holiday!

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The BP spill demands a far more significant response than ongoing cleanups, unsuccessful attempts to plug the gushing oil, and desperate efforts to mitigate the multitude of impacts from the biggest oil catastrophe in U.S. history. The BP spill demands a paradigm shift in how we run our economy and carry out our governance. Historians will one day look back on this spill as the nadir of governmental regulatory performance, in which oil companies commandeered and corrupted the Interior Department oil leasing program. So what’s the response we need to get the paradigm shift going? How about declaring a new holiday?