Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
If French intellectual Jean Baudrillard were still alive to deconstruct the unfurling Gulf oil disaster, I’m sure he’d marvel at the hyperreality of it all. Me, lacking the vocabulary, I’m going to call it reality TV.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Deepwater Horizon
-Exclusive: Was disregard for industry standards on BP rig worse than we thought?
-Deep Water Oil The Final Frontier
-Senate Panel Ends Liability Limits for Offshore Spills
The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) published their quarterly Energy Trends document last week. It covers up to the first quarter 2010…It’s a familiar story: every year the UK’s primary energy production declines significantly. Today, primary energy production is almost half what it was at the peak just a decade ago. Has any other country, let alone major economy experienced such a speed and magnitude shift in its energy system outside wartime?
At last report BP was making progress on the relief wells that are being drilled to plug the runaway well in the Gulf. The London Times reports that BP hopes to penetrate the casing of the leaking well and start pumping in well-sealing mud in about two weeks. Let’s hope something works.
The race is on: can we extract the last remnants of Western oil from such unlikely places as the ocean floor before the global economy picks up enough to test out the hypothesis that supplies have already peaked?
“Everybody gets peak oil in some sense because, you know, what’s BP doing drilling in a mile of water at the Macondo well, or planning to develop the Tiber field which is much deeper below the ocean floor? Or for that matter, what’s Suncor doing in the tar sands? We’re there because that’s all that’s left. They may not want to articulate it as peak oil, but their actions speak louder than their words.”
A roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The Deepwater Horizon
-Venezuela continues nationalizations
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
The future most people are living into is beginning to disappear. The financial crisis threw the first punch, but oil depletion will deliver the knockout blow. The moment people realize that the society they have known their whole life can no longer function the same way without the energy provided by oil, it will become glaringly apparent that the future will be very, very different.
Boris Yelnikoff is a self-described “Nobel-level thinker” who feels beseiged by “microbes,” one of his many terms for people who don’t see “the big picture.” And, what’s the big picture? He tells us in the first five minutes of Woody Allen’s latest movie, “Whatever Works,” when he says, “On the whole, I’m sorry to say, we’re a failed species.”
The IEA’s latest medium term report on oil and gas presents a rosier outlook than before. The supply-demand balance will be easier than previously forecast, the Agency now says, as continuing economic weakness dampens demand growth, and stronger oil prices encourage more investment in production capacity. But the report hedges its optimism, warning that potential geopolitical eruptions, and ripple effects from the Deepwater Horizon disaster on offshore drilling remain as risks…
BP has been given until Friday, July 2 to provide documentary evidence establishing exactly what is happening behind the scenes at their ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil spill. This material would answer current worst-case scenario speculation about the state of BP’s Mocando wellbore – whether it is structurally compromised – and the ongoing attempts to dig relief wells…The demand comes in a letter written by Congressman Edward J. Markey, chairman of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee.
