Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The pipeline debate is often framed in terms of whether the jobs it will create justify its environmental risks. Let’s ignore those risks for the moment. Forget climate change. Forget leaks. Forget potential damage to streams and aquifers. Now does the pipeline make sense?
Not much.
– Chris Nelder: Is peak oil dead?
– Oil, politics and resource wars (interviews with Robert Hirsch, Michael Klare … )
– The Unfinished Story of Iraq’s Oil Law: An Interview with Greg Muttitt
– Will Drought Cause the Next Blackout?
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Middle East in turmoil
-The drought worsens
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
Only the oil industry would now have the audacity once again to peddle a story that it has gotten wrong for more than a decade as if it were brand new. Enlisting the media and its army of paid consultants, the industry is once again telling the public that oil abundance is at hand. And, what is doubly audacious is that it is promoting this tale as oil prices hover at levels more than eight times the 1999 low.
The usual assumption that economists, financial planners, and actuaries make is that future real GDP growth can be expected to be fairly similar to the average past growth rate for some historical time period. This assumption can take a number of forms–how much a portfolio can be expected to yield in a future period, or how high real (that is, net of inflation considerations) interest rates can be expected to be in the future, or what percentage of GDP the government of a country can safely borrow. But what if this assumption is wrong, and expected growth in real GDP is really declining over time?
Oil prices rose this week as geopolitical tensions trumped economic concerns. The Syrian conflict, oil sanctions against Iran, and a suicide bombing of an Israeli tourist bus in Bulgaria, which Israel blamed on Iran, all added to fear of disruption in the region…
Some parts of the world pretty much sailed through the 2008-2009 recession, while other parts of the world had huge problems. The part that sailed through the recession is what I call the “Growing Part of the World”. I thought it would be interesting to see how the countries in the “Growing Part of the World” have behaved over the long term with respect to a number of variables (energy, GDP, and population). I compare these countries to two other groups of countries which did not fare as well during the 2008-2009 recession: European Union 27, United States and Japan, and the Former Soviet Union (FSU).
The last six months or so have seen an unprecedented flood of official pronouncements and media stories attempting, with dubious results, to brush aside the reality of peak oil. Those of my readers who know their way around old science fiction serials know what this means: something is about to explode.
Carpe Diem, Reuters, FTalphaville, and WhaleOil are among those calling attention to a new paper by Leonardo Maugeri, senior manager for the Italian oil company Eni, and Senior Fellow at Harvard University. Here I take a look at some of the details of Maugeri’s analysis.
Few would argue with the proposition that within the next 20 or 30 years our current sources of fossil fuels and other somewhat substitutable liquids will be only a fraction of the 90 or so million barrels a day (b/d) that we are current consuming. Long before then however, fossil fuels are likely to become so expensive that major changes in how we power our civilization are likely to have occurred.
-«Denying the imminence of Peak Oil is a Tragic Error », says ex- IEA petroleum expert
-Oil prices could be rigged by traders warns G20 report
-Shell’s Arctic Drilling Venture Stumbles Toward Reality
Steve Levine has a blog post discussing the idea that the “unfolding new age of fossil fuel abundance” will have profound effects on various things, including OPEC…The key factor behind this kind of thinking is the rapid rise of production of oil from tight rocks like the Bakken in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford in Texas. I haven’t taken a strong position on what the limits of production are from these sources – it just isn’t clear to me yet from the data that I have available. But we could certainly place some limits on how much geopolitical impact this could have on OPEC.
