Oil

An update on global net oil exports: Is it midnight on the Titanic?

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While slowly increasing US crude oil production is very important, the dominant trend we are seeing is that developed oil importing countries like the US are being gradually priced out of the global market for exported oil, as global oil prices doubled from 2005 to 2011, and as developing countries like the Chindia region consumed an increasing share of a declining volume of global net exports of oil. (webinar on Thursday April 26)

Review: Falling Through Time by Patricia Comroe Frank

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Since its beginnings, the sleeper-awakes scenario has been one of the most commonly used frameworks for introducing fictional utopias and dystopias–yet somehow it doesn’t feel overdone. The reason, I suspect, is that the sleep is incidental to the story, the true focus being the new world order and how it compares with the old. That’s certainly the case with Patricia Frank’s Falling Through Time, the story of a woman who travels into the future and takes us on a sort of guided tour of it. Her name is Summer Holbrook, and she’s a prominent advertising executive who goes missing while vacationing in Alaska. After suffering a spill down a glacier crevasse, she freezes, falls into suspended animation and is found and rescued by a band of expeditioners in the year 2084.

The Myth That the US Will Soon Become an Oil Exporter

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Countries trade crude oil and oil products back and forth. When all of these transactions are netted out, is the US close to becoming a “net” oil exporter?

With the recent increase in oil production (perhaps even exceeding that of Russia on a “barrels-per-day” basis), a person might think that US oil production problems are behind us. If we look at the data, though, it is very clear that the US is still a long way from becoming a net oil exporter.

The politics of drilling in the dark zone

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The Northbelt Thrust falls into a curious category on the global oil patch. Like dark matter in the universe, it is a blank spot, one of a few places with big proven and potential reserves that are wholly ignored in official forecasts. For it is offshore from Cuba, a political pariah in the U.S.

A ban on oil speculation?

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Joseph P. Kennedy II, former Congressional Representative from Massachusetts, and founder, chairman, and president of Citizens Energy Corporation, has a proposal to make energy affordable for all. All we have to do, Kennedy claims, is “bar pure oil speculators entirely from commodity exchanges in the United States.”

By what mysterious process can all this within-day buying and selling of “paper” energy be the factor that is responsible for both a price of oil in excess of $100/barrel and a price of natural gas at record lows below $2 per thousand cubic feet? I suspect the reason that Kennedy does not explain the details to us is because he does not have a clue himself.

Easing Off the Gas

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The Do the Math blog series has built the case that physical growth cannot continue indefinitely; that fossil fuel availability will commence a decline this century—starting with petroleum; that alternative energy schemes constitute imperfect substitutes for fossil fuels; and has concluded that a very smart strategy for us to adopt is to slow down while we sort out the biggest transition humans have ever faced. The idea is to relieve pressure on the system, avoid the Energy Trap, and give ourselves the best possible chance for a successful transformation to a stable future.

Transportation and the New Generation: Why Young People are Driving Less and What it Means for Transportation Policy

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From World War II until just a few years ago, the number of miles driven annually on America’s roads steadily increased. Then, at the turn of the century, something changed: Americans began driving less. By 2011, the average American was driving 6 percent fewer miles per year than in 2004. The trend away from driving has been led by young people.

Are oil subsidies worth the price?

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With peak oil moving closer globally and with oil prices spiking yet again (bouncing around over US$100 per barrel), subsidies become economically unsustainable. So the question becomes: at what point should a government begin to decrease an oil subsidy and how, if ever, can this be done without severely impacting the poorest?