Pump Bills Irk Stations, Too

Gas station owners aren’t fueling your pain, they’re feeling it. Station owners earn more from selling a bottle of Pepsi than 6 gallons of gas, despite near-record gas prices. “If the consumer thinks it’s ugly buying 15 or 30 gallons at these prices, you ought to buy them 9,000 gallons at a time,” says Bud […]

Basra Oil Workers Out on Strike

Workers at Iraq’s South Oil Company are holding a one-day strike to demand a bigger share of the country’s oil revenues for the region. The southern city of Basra and the region around it produce most of Iraq’s crude exports. Provincial governor Mohammad al-Waili, who called the strike, has called for the province to be […]

Tourists Evacuated as Hurricane Emily Nears Mexican Coast

Mexico also launched a large-scale evacuation of offshore oil platforms, ordering 15,000 workers off rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and leaving less than 1,000 attendants behind. The state-owned Pemex oil company said the move included closing 63 wells and halting the production of 480,000 barrels of oil per day.

Emily is expected to cross over the Yucatan peninsula and re-emerge in the gulf Monday. The hurricane is then expected to cross the gulf and hit Mexico again — this time near the U.S. border — later in the week.

On its passage through the Caribbean, Emily’s winds ravaged hundreds of homes on the island of Grenada, destroyed crops and killed at least one man whose home was buried under a landslide.

AP via NYT

It’s the rate of extraction, stupid!

Even if the world suddenly had 10 trillion more barrels of oil in the ground, it might not matter much in the short term. If the maximum possible rate of extraction ended up being something under what we currently consume or what we’d like to consume, we would still be in deep trouble. So, when reports appear that new technologies are going to double the amount of oil we can extract from old wells, the crucial question to ask is not, “How much?” but rather, “How fast?”

Resource Insights

China’s Major Oilfield Pumps 22.6 Mln Tons of Oil in First Half

Crude oil output from China’s biggest oilfield Daqing during the first half of this year totaled 22.66 million tons, exceeding its oil production target, a country’s major national newspaper reported Sunday. The People’s Daily said the oilfield also produced 1.229 billion cubic meters of natural gas during the six-month period. Meanwhile, the proved oil reserve […]

Nicaragua Hits the Crunch First

Recently, Fidel Castro, who attended the first PetroCaribe Energy Summit at Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, made a statement that was ignored by international media. He informed the summit that no Caribbean country will be able to purchase oil once the price reaches $100 a barrel. Castro was only pointing out the obviousThe Republic

‘Elephants’ Are A Gamble, Especially When There Are Hurricanes Around

Whether oil companies are up against hurricanes, errant winches or freezing temperatures, Thunder Horse and Sakhalin Energy highlight the technical and logistical challenges of the search for oil. Thunder Horse, which analysts say is potentially the most profitable oil-production facility in the world, is in water 1,800 metres deep. Over the past 10 years, as […]

DOE Raises Hydrogen Cost Target

The Department of Energy (DOE) has raised the target it has set for the end-user cost of hydrogen to $2.00Green Car Congress

Toyota and BP May Partner to Research Biofuels

Nikkei Business reports that Toyota has begun negotiations with BP on a joint research effort into biofuels. By entering into a new partnership with BP, Toyota hopes to conduct research into areas such as the economic viability of biofuels, their effect on vehicles, and possible feedstocks. Talks are currently focused on narrowing down the research […]

A Car that Runs on Air?

On the 20th September a car with an air-compressed engine, invented by the Frenchman Guy N

Bizarre Weather Signals Threat of Monster Typhoons

Aberrant weather patterns have made for a strange rainy season so far this year, reports Friday (7/22). For one thing, the rain front came to a halt over Niigata Prefecture on the Sea of Japan, inundating the prefecture while Shikoku, on the opposite side of the archipelago, saw nary a drop. And Tokyo got hit […]

UN Nuclear Agency Urges Monitoring In Japan, US -Report

The International Atomic Energy Agency is pushing for closer international monitoring of as many as 10 nuclear facilities in the United States, Japan, Russia, Finland and other countries, a media report said Saturday. The U.N. watchdog agency has been seeking to bring facilities conducting uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing under international management to ensure that […]

Japan’s Move in East China Sea Makes Conflict ”Inevitable” – Report

Japan is stamping on China’s maritime rights by granting Japanese firm Teikoku Oil Co the right to test drill for gas and oil in a part of the East China Sea disputed by the two countries and muddying the waters of the East China Sea, the China Daily said in an editorial Saturday. Japan’s move […]

A gut reaction to a benefit-cost analysis…

Ianqui writes: Lately, the issue of benefit-cost analyes have been popping up on the blogosphere. On Environmental Economics today, there’s a post about whether or not it makes economic sense for the economically-depressed town of Taylor, Florida to give the go-ahead to a coal-fired power plant. Economist John Whitehead does a back-of-the-envelope calculation to determine whether or not the plant is beneficial by balancing the revenue of the plant and the generation of new jobs against environmental costs such as sulfur dioxide, acid rain, carbon monoxide, etc. Each of these toxins are assigned a monetary value, and Whitehead comes up with the following: “Subtracting costs from benefits the annual net benefits to the town of Taylor are $3.75 – $1.33 = $2.42 million.”

While I appreciate this post from an academic and intellectual standpoint, the whole thing makes me physically recoil. The idea that everything in the universe has a monetary value–including the cost of cancer, of polluting groundwater, of causing global warming by releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, of killing fish in lakes that are affected by acid rain–is truly chilling…

More after the jump at The Oil Drum.

Prince Sees Dollar Peg as Key to Gulf ‘Euro’

SIX leading Arab economies, including Saudi Arabia, may reconsider pegging their currencies to the dollar, under their plans for a Times Online

Peak Oil 2005?

You are now in the pre-peak oil awareness zone. Over a dozen books have been written. Peak Oil websites have sprung up like one of those oil gushers that used to be common about 50 years ago. Even the mainstream media outlets have let Peak Oil have its say on their pages. What can we […]

China Races to Expand Nuclear Power Industry

The shadows of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island no longer reach to the pine-crested hillsides of Hangzhou Bay, where China is rushing to expand a nuclear power station to meet soaring demand for electricity for its economic boom. Driven by crushing fuel shortages, smog and ambitions to profit from its hard-won nuclear prowess, Beijing has […]

Analyst: US Needs 850 Rigs in 5 Years to Meet Demand

The US will need 850 more drilling rigs in the next 5 years, said J. Marshall Adkins, Raymond James & Associates Inc. “That represents a 50% increase over today’s rig fleet and equates to a 7% compounded annual growth rate,” he said in a July 11 report. “Rig crews and labor will likely be the […]

Oil Prices Alone Can’t Control Demand

That, at least, has been the guiding theory for U.S. energy policymakers, who since the early 1990s have been more or less content to let markets determine how quickly and in which direction our oil system evolves. When prices get high enough, we’ll change. Until then, there is no crisis: If we don’t feel compelled […]

EIA Mulls Cut In China Oil Demand Forecast Amid Slowdow

With evidence of a sharp slowdown in Chinese oil demand growth mounting, the federal Energy Information Administration is considering lowering its forecast of the country’s oil consumption for the second time in three months. The EIA, the statistics arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, which last month lowered its estimate of Chinese oil demand […]

High oil prices to deliver

Gordon Brown will get a Telegraph

Food movement ‘harms environment’

The distribution of food across the UK in cars and lorries adds to pollution, congestion and climate change, a report by the government says. It said the environmental cost of moving food was as much as BBC

The Crystal Ball is Murky Today…

Heading Out writes: There is a story in Bloomberg today about the rise in business for the very largest crude oil carriers (VLCC

World citizens want Europe to be more influential than the US

A public opinion poll across 23 countries finds that in 20, a majority (17) or a plurality (3) of citizens think it would be mainly positive for Europe to become more influential than the US in world affairs. Currently, Europe is seen as having a mainly positive influence in the world in 22 countries. Among […]

Nexen bets big on coalbed methane

But the real surprise from the Calgary-based company, Canada’s No. 4 independent oil firm, came as it said it’s spending $400 million in the next 18 months developing its first commercial coalbed methane project, drilling as many as 265 horizontal wells into coal seams in the Fort Assiniboine area in central Alberta. Calgary Herald

Climate Scientists See Intimidation in Letter from House Energy Chair

Texas Republican Rep. Joe Barton, powerful chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has created a stir among many of the nation’s leading climate scientists over what they call an “unprecedented” inquiry into their research. In late June, Barton sent a letter to three scientists whose findings show that global temperatures have increased dramatically […]

Energy Independence: Weaning off Fossil Fuels

It is becoming clearer that the use of fossil fuels is impacting our changing climate, but political and financial support for these fuels makes it more difficult to wean ourselves off of them. OneWorld presents part two of a three-part series on climate change from its new “treeless” magazine, Perspectives, which offers more background and context on the issue, viewpoints from non-profit organizations, and ways for individuals to get involved.

OneWorld US via Yahoo! News

E. Siberian Megaproject Hit by Rising Costs

Poster’s Comments: The Global & Mail reports (also in CanWest’s National Post), that rising commodity and labour prices are impacting the cost of the Sakhalin project.  A big factor is the declining value of the US dollar vs the ruble which appears to be pushing up costs from the non-Russian perspective. 

The Globe and Mail

muhandis

Peak Oil and Climate Change…?

DaveC writes: Back in October of 2003, the current president of ASPO Kjell Aleklett told news sources that there was “Too little oil for global warming”. Humankind faces two unprecedented crises, fossil fuels depletion in the near term and climate change on a longer timescale. What’s the connection between them? There’s quite a bit of one, depending on the evidence you look at…

An in-depth discussion after the jump at The Oil Drum.

Siberia getting warmer: study

AVERAGE temperatures in Siberia have risen by three degrees Celsius since 1960, research by a team of German scientists has found.Furthermore the forests in the region are less effective in soaking up greenhouse gases than previously believed.

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