Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-BP Fought Safety Measures at Deepwater Oil Rigs
-Toyota’s Bill Reinert on Peak Oil
-How Bad Is the Oil Spill? Ask the Pelicans
-Asean members try to forge agreement on oil and gas rich Spratly Islands
-Track the Gulf of Mexico oil spill movement in animated graphic
-Response options for BP oil spill
The optimists may have long been winning the peak oil media battle – as Matt Simmons observes – but we are beginning to see information coming out on the business pages that allows us to piece together a more balanced story. Right now, much of this focuses on everyone’s favourite cause for optimism, the oil sands…But do the facts support this rampant enthusiasm? I’d suggest not.
A few years ago I made a graph illustrating my view of the timing of future oil price shocks. I’ve updated that graph to reflect the current price, but I haven’t changed my mind about the timing of the next blow-up. Here it is.
It is amazing that there always has to be a catastrophe before the media will take up an issue even though we researchers showed that there would be a problem already back in 2003. The question is whether the opportunity now exists to make Peak Oil a global political question?
The involvement of the U. S. military in many civilian tasks seems in some ways logical. But that is just the problem. We are shaping public policies and priorities so that the resources to perform these tasks are increasingly unavailable to the civilian federal agencies or to the state and municipal governments responsible for them. Starved of tax revenue or congressional appropriations, these entities have turned to the military for help.
Dr Michael Lardelli from the University of Adelaide looks at how the bulk of the world’s oil production comes from a relatively small number of very large fields discovered decades ago. The rate of world oil production has been maintained at current levels only by finding and bringing on line an increasing number of smaller fields, but the financial cost and the energy required to find and develop these new fields is constantly increasing. According to Dr Lardelli the so-called peak of oil production was actually in 2008.
Is Acadiana lost? In truth the Cajuns and their kindred have been losing their idyllic wetlands for decades. Deepwater Horizon may just be the atë, if you will.
As oil companies reported sharply increased profits this week, an estimated 5000 barrels of oil a day was spewing into the Gulf of Mexico following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. This ecological disaster comes just a month after President Obama gave the green light to expand drilling off the US coast, and while the timing of the disaster could hardly be worse for big oil’s PR…
The news from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is not good. If the NOAA estimates are right about the size of the spill it could dwarf Exxon Valdez…
With BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout in the news, the world’s interest is now focused on deepwater oil production. BP has another deepwater platform in the Gulf of Mexico—Thunder Horse—where it has been working some for some time. My analysis suggests production is not going well as planned at Thunder Horse.
Here we go again. The tragic explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig and subsequent oil spill has stirred up the usual offshore drilling debate in the United States. Apparently, the Halliburton people had just finished completing the well when something went terribly wrong. Such incidents are relatively rare, and it’s not known what the (over) reaction will be yet.
The Arabian camel has only one hump.
