Oil

Energy and peak oil – May 14

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– Peak Oil – Forbes author concedes on “Net Exports” debate
– Oil prices could double by 2022, IMF warned
– Jeff Rubin argues in “The End of Growth” that central bankers must focus on high energy prices
– Jevons paradox busted by new emissions fee mechanism.
– No clear correlation between energy use and growth rate of the economy in the EU

Updating world deepwater oil & gas discovery

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Deepwater oil production will help reduce the decline in world oil production from aging fields. The IEA claims that four Saudi Arabias need to be discovered up to 2030 to replace the present decline in production (about 5 %/a). The deepwater ultimate is likely to represent less than half of Saudi Arabia’s oil ultimate. It is not enough!

ODAC Newsletter – May 11

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Fears of a new phase in the European debt crisis, a decline in oil imports to China in April, and the prospect of a new round of international talks on Iran’s nuclear programme have seen oil prices drop back from recent highs in the past two weeks. Despite all this however, and reports from OPEC that it bolstered supply by 320,000 barrels in April, Brent oil still stands around $112/barrel.

The energy wars heat up

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Conflict and intrigue over valuable energy supplies have been features of the international landscape for a long time. Major wars over oil have been fought every decade or so since World War I, and smaller engagements have erupted every few years; a flare-up or two in 2012, then, would be part of the normal scheme of things. Instead, what we are now seeing is a whole cluster of oil-related clashes stretching across the globe, involving a dozen or so countries, with more popping up all the time. Consider these flash-points as signals that we are entering an era of intensified conflict over energy.

Energy – May 10

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– Thomas Homer-Dixon: Exploring the climate “mindscape” (oil supplies and energy junk)
– Government influence is negative for energy fuel policy
– The German Switch from Nuclear to Renewables
– Scientists’ Arctic drilling plan aims to demystify undersea greenhouse gases
– Ancien directeur de TOTAL: Nouvelles découvertes et gaz de schiste retarderont à peine le pic pétrolier

The impermanence of Eden

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I grew up in the 1970s and 80s in Eagan, Minn., near an unusual farmer who worked a remarkable piece of land. The young Martin Diffley grew an array of vegetables on fields tucked amid grassy, protective hills and dense woods, a landscape much different from the deforested, monoculture farms so common in the region. Diffley established his Gardens of Eagan, one of the first organic farms in the Midwest, on land that had been owned by the Diffley family since 1855; pesticides and other common agricultural chemicals had never been used on it. But its edenic traits could not save it. In the late 1980s, as the Twin Cities oozed into the countryside around it, the forests were bulldozed and the hills flattened to make way for unimaginative houses in various shades of beige.

The story behind the loss of that place forms the broken heart of Turn Here Sweet Corn, a new memoir by Atina Diffley, Martin’s wife. The book is billed as a gardening guide, love story, business handbook, and legal thriller, but it is really a wrenching tale of a common yet private tragedy: the way development pressures push farming families off the land, and what happens to those families during and afterward….

Visualize Gasoline

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Visualize gasoline-powered civilization arising as if by some maniacally accelerated evolutionary process. It all began so recently, in the mid-nineteenth century, and spread across the globe in mere decades. Automobiles mutated and competed for dominance on vast networks of roads built to accommodate them. Shopping malls and parking garages sprang up to attract and hold them. And powering it all was an ever-widening but mostly invisible river of gasoline–the poisonous blood of 700 million dinosaur-like machines that now dot landscapes around the world.

The peak oil crisis: perspective

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While waiting to see how the Iranian nuclear confrontation and the various Eurozone crises sort themselves out, there is time to step back and look at the interaction of the major forces that will shape our future. While the problems of oil depletion are already upon us, shrinking resources are only a part of global dynamics currently.