ASPO Newsletter #51, March 2005
This month’s ASPO Newsletter includes a depletion profile of Malaysia, and collates some of the most important energy news from the last month.
Oil
The long road down: decline and the deindustrial future
The crucial needs that must be met in an age of decline are damage control, cultural survival, and the building of a new society amid the ruins of the old. Political and business interests aren’t going to meet these needs, or do anything else helpful; oil is to the modern industrial nations what corn was to the ancient Maya, and the ahauob of Washington and Wall Street have turned to war just as their Maya equivalents did.
Fundamentals in the Oil Pricing Game
Any production numbers for OPEC are subject to the key question: net or gross? This pattern, of domestic oil demand increasing much faster than production, is common to far more than 9 out of 10 oil producers, both OPEC and nonOPEC. Net exports, therefore, will always tend to grow slower than national production.
Oil prices could hit 80 dollars in next two years: OPEC
Prices of crude oil could surge to as high as 80 dollars a barrel within the next two years but such a level would not last long, OPEC’s acting secretary general was quoted as saying.
New Zealand: Why the Petrol Tax is Good Thing
Our Government is well aware of Peak Oil thus the 5% Petrol Tax is an underhanded market signal. A signal that alternatives need to be developed to our energy hungry, drive in utopia, recreational shopping lifestyles.
Mexico’s Largest Oil Field in Premature Decline
Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), Mexico’s state oil monopoly, said it expects production at its Cantarell oil field to begin declining this year, earlier than previously forecast.
Cantarell is the largest oil field in Mexico, and the eighth largest in the world. The field, which has been in production since 1979, had produced 2.11 million barrels per day in 2004. Pemex expects that to decline by 5% to 2.0 mbpd in 2005.
The oil factor in Bush’s ‘war on tyranny’
General Norman Schwarzkopf, who led the 1991 attack on Iraq, told the US Congress in 1990: “Middle East oil is the West’s lifeblood. It fuels us today, and being 77% of the free world’s proven oil reserves, is going to fuel us when the rest of the world runs dry.”
Oil prices confound experts
Latest figures from the oil industry have confounded expert predictions of a price fall in the last two months. As prices have remained above $50 a barrel, Opec’s statements in particular have come under close scrutiny.
The Mitigation of the Peaking of World Oil Production
Startling press release regarding a recently completed study of oil peak responses. Full report not yet received, but apparently claims all alternatives are incapable of meeting demand in the short term and argues that efficiency measures and drastic scaling up of production of substitute fuels is required.
The next big race: after nuclear arms, is energy next?
…the nuclear arms race was a lot more straightforward than its emerging post-Cold War successor: the energy race. It’s a similarly brutal zero-sum game, but one characterized by an ever-shifting web of opportunistic, cross-cutting allegiances that make the nuclear world order appear pleasantly tidy and predictable by comparison.
China’s Oil Diplomacy in Latin America
Latin America is becoming a rich destination for China in its global quest for energy, with the Chinese quickly signing accords with Venezuela, investing in largely untapped markets like Peru and exploring possibilities in Bolivia and Colombia, and especially Venezuela.
Power = Power
…the global oil peak implies that all the nations of the world will have less total energy to divvy up. I just don’t see where the United States is in a particularly favorable position on this. Have you heard of any plans to reduce our extreme dependence on cars? …Are we going to subcontract the Jolly Green Giant to go around America moving things closer together so we don’t have to burn so much gasoline?
