Oil

Blackbeard’s return

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For some years — and long before the Gulf of Mexico spill — Big Oil has seemed to be in existential peril. These gargantuans have been starved of new resources and wrong-footed by state-owned oil companies like China’s Sinopec and Malaysia’s Petronas, which are also competing around the world for drilling rights. At stake has been not only Big Oil’s good health — after all, how many people really care whether Chevron or Shell thrive, apart from their shareholders? — but also the power of nations. It’s part of narrative of the rise of the East, and the decline of the West.

Oilwatch Monthly June 2010

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Conventional crude production – Latest figures from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that crude oil production including lease condensates decreased by 107,000 b/d from February to March 2010, resulting in total production of crude oil including lease condensates of 73.41 million b/d.

A tepid plea for unspecified change

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Last night’s presidential speech on the Gulf oil spill had been pre-billed by the Washington Post as Barack Obama’s “Jimmy Carter moment.” But reading any of Carter’s speeches (a good one to start with is that of April 18, 1977) side by side with last night’s bromide is an invitation to nostalgia and bitter disappointment.

Getting at a tiny portion of the truth in Obama’s speech

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In 2006 when I first met Julian Darley, author of _High Noon for Natural Gas_ and the founder of the Post-Carbon Institute, the world was excited by then-famous “Jack” oil field find in the Gulf of Mexico. Both of us were watching the way the world was interpreting the data – people were claiming that there might be 10, 12, 15 billion barrels of oil – five miles down underneath the ocean…Darley, framing the issue brilliantly, observed that “this isn’t salvation, this is digging around in the couch cushions for loose change.”

The peak oil crisis: a speech to the nation

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After 17 months in office, it now seems clear that the Obama administration is not going to confront the peak oil issue straight on, unless absolutely necessary. Like the Bush administration, the hope remains that gas prices will remain affordable and economy-disabling oil shortages will not develop until after the administration leaves office.

The perfect spill: solutions for averting the next Deepwater Horizon

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“If we refuse to take into account the full cost of our fossil fuel addiction—if we don’t factor in the environmental costs and national security costs and true economic costs—we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future.”

–President Barack Obama, Carnegie Mellon University, June 2, 2010

The other half of the geyser

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Crude oil in the gulf yields good TV images, but BP and its contractors have untapped a geyser not only of oil, but of methane–more than 20 time as effective as CO2 at holding heat. The percentage of the gush that’s methane is roughly estimated at 40-50%, subject to verification.

Belief systems at a turning point

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With the BP Horizon Blowout, we may be hitting a turning point in belief systems, in more than one way:
• Can businesses really be expected to regulate themselves, with minimal oversight?
• Can technology solve all our problems?
• If there are technological solutions, can they be expected immediately?
• Can we really depend on the oil supply that everyone has told us is here?