Peak oil review – Oct 26
A weekly review including:
– Production and prices
– Copenhagen
– Oil and Money Conference
– Quote of the Week
– Briefs
A weekly review including:
– Production and prices
– Copenhagen
– Oil and Money Conference
– Quote of the Week
– Briefs
Our industry is at a crossroads. In the past few years, oil supply has struggled to keep pace with demand. But the financial crisis has reduced demand by 2 million barrels per day, creating excess inventories and lower prices. But once economic growth recovers, it is likely we will return to the market conditions of one year ago. The price of $140 per barrel oil was not an aberration; it was a warning.
“Peak oil can be a very tricky topic, the way I talk about it and deal with it at the end of the day is: We need to revolutionize the way we consume and produce energy… We need to really be the leaders in saying: the future for our children and our grandchildren as far as energy consumption and as far as production, it looks like this” with those words Colorado Governor Bill Ritter started his closing speech at the ASPO conference in Denver that took place from 10 to 12 October 2009.
Hold on to your hat! There will be no smooth descent from the worldwide peak.
The price of oil has more than doubled from its nadir of $30 a barrel earlier this year. To explain the resilience of oil prices in the face of a severe economic slump, the oil optimists have turned to an old standby argument: resource nationalism.
This week ODAC welcomes the publication of two important reports. In its excellent Heads in the Sand report, Global Witness provides one of the clearest summaries of the peak oil issue to date, including a trenchant critique of the IEA’s position…
The main conclusion of the British report is that there is a “significant risk” that conventional oil production will peak before 2020, and that forecasts which delay the event beyond 2030 are based on assumptions that are “at best optimistic and at worst implausible.”
A weekly review including:
– Production and prices
– Iraq
-Supply and Debate
-The Next Oil Crisis is Just Ahead
-Oil prices hit high but report warns of supply crunch
-Anthropological Field Guide to Common Peak Oil Debate Participants
So far in this series of technical talks, I have tried to explain some of the pieces that have to be put together to get crude oil or natural gas out of the ground. I intend to go on with the series in the coming weeks, but thought that today I would put some of the different thoughts that I have talked about recently together. So I am going to talk a little about reserve calculations and production and will use an example to show how the numbers are derived. And again, let me stress that this is a very simplified example. It is also only somewhat fictionalized, as I shall comment at the end.
A decade ago, Scientific American published the seminal article by these two luminaries of the Peak Oil awareness movement, that relaunched the debate on M. King Hubbert’s finds, Scientific American appears now as a completely different publication. Now, however, scientific content doesn’t seem to be a requisite for its articles. Among other eerie details, Leonardo Maugeri goes as far as citing “Common Wisdom” to present erroneous facts.
-Government failure to acknowledge the looming oil supply crunch threatens the climate and risks international conflict
-UK Report Warns of Oil Shortage
-Key report aims to tackle global peak oil crisis