Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
With crude-oil prices inching toward $60 a barrel earlier this month, renewed talk of tapping Colorado’s vast oil-shale resources wasn’t surprising. This time, federal lawmakers are wisely urging caution in possible shale development to avoid the dislocations of the frenetic oil-shale boom and bust of the early 1980s.
Crude crossroads: Azerbaijan is not only a major oil producer and port but also sits in a strategic and volatile place on the Caspian, bordered not only by its bitter enemy Armenia but also by Russia, Iran, and Georgia.
Often overlooked, rubber could as easily bring the economy to a halt as oil could.
THE world faces a global oil supply shortage after 2007, which would threaten economic growth, according to new research by the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (Odac) which says that not enough major new fields will come on stream to offset declines .
Dubbed “NOPEC”, a bill passed by the US Senate Judiciary Committee would allow legal action to be taken against cartels such as OPEC, said Senator Patrick Leahy, one of the bill’s co-sponsors.
We have become much more efficient in our use of oil since the 1970s, claim the analysts, and therefore higher oil prices will only have a modest upward impact on inflation. Although the statement is true, the concept masks a lot of dirty little problems.
Undoubtedly, the most important question to try to resolve in modelling future world oil production is the true size of Middle East reserves. It is obvious that the official reports of remaining reserves are grossly unreliable.
Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s only OPEC member, may become a net oil importer this year as projects led by ConocoPhillips, Unocal Corp. and PetroChina Co. fail to stem falling output, helping to boost fuel prices to records.
Robert Ebel of CSIS, Washington, talks to Global Public Media’s Julian Darley about the difficulties that Russian oil and gas production now faces. He also comments on US energy policy and the new Oilfields Megaprojects Report.
Speculation over the actual size of Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves is reaching fever pitch as a major bank says the kingdom’s – and the world’s – biggest field, Gharwar, is in irreversible decline.
Social critic James Howard Kunstler has railed for years against the twin evils of bad urban design and suburban sprawl. Based in Saratoga Springs, the author of The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere warns that our beloved cars — and the subdivided landscape they drive us to — are leading American culture down a four-lane highway to destruction.
Realism is the philosophical notion that what our scientific theories tell us about the world are more or less, or approximately true.
