Peak Oil Passnotes: Russian About Going Nowhere

If we ever needed reminding of the problem of making forecasts about crude oil and products we only need think of three tiny letters, I, E and A. The International Energy Agency (IEA), so frowned upon in 2004 and 2005 for failing to foresee the sharp rise in demand, has this week decided that some […]

IAEA suspends Iran aid projects

The UN nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, says it has frozen almost half its technical aid projects involving Iran. The IAEA says its move is to comply with UN sanctions imposed on Tehran late last year over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment. BBC

Oil and gas companies scramble to develop fuel cells

Gas and oil suppliers, facing competition from electric utilities over household heating systems, are stepping up development of fuel cells. Tokyo Gas Co. is displaying a fuel cell-based cogeneration system at the Third Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Expo, a three-day exhibition that began on Wednesday in Tokyo. asahi

Canadian Oil Industry Fears Possible Tax Increase, Enviro Controls

Canada’s oil companies are preparing themselves for possible tax increases and environmental controls from a Conservative government under pressure to enforce tougher policies on the industry, according to a letter obtained by the Toronto Globe and Mail. rigzone

Oil companies discuss energy challenges

In the past 10 years, he said, several industry mergers and higher oil prices have given the big players the money to pursue such endeavors yahoo

The Oil Drum: The WSJ Writes that Gas Taxes Make Sense!

The above numbers come from a poll of market economists who are asked their opinion on various macro-economic topics. 54% say that taxes are a good idea…of course, that’s 3 reasons (beyond the fact that it’s in the WSJ) not to think it’s a good thing, right? poll. market. economists… Much more after thee jump […]

‘Rampant’ society upsets natural order

People are failing to wake up to the fact that if the planet suffers, we all suffer, argues Fazlun Khalid. In this week’s Green Room, he says we must respect the delicate nature of the Earth or risk leaving a toxic legacy for future generations. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has spoken, the politicians […]

Activist embraces an end to suburbia

Last week, I was lucky enough to catch a presentation by James Kunstler. A flag-bearer for the New Urbanist movement, Kunstler is a former staff writer for Rolling Stone who left journalism in 1975 to write books. In the past decade, he has emerged as one of America’s foremost voices on topics including soul-numbing suburban […]

CIBC no longer predicting $100-a-barrel oil any time soon

TORONTO “We

A rush-hour tax on urban drivers

President Bush plans to help cities and states impose ‘congestion pricing’ as a way to curb carbon gases. President Bush wants to give $305 million to cities and states to come up with ways to charge drivers for traveling at peak traffic. Such “congestion pricing” has worked in a few cities such as London and […]

US moves in on Africa

This week’s US decision to create a new Pentagon command covering Africa, known as Africom, has a certain unlovely military logic. Like Roman emperors of old, Washington’s Caesars arbitrarily divide much of the world into Middle Eastern, European and Pacific domains. Now it is Africa’s turn. Practical more than imperial considerations dictated the White House […]

UK approves world first offshore wind hybrid plan

LONDON (Reuters) – The UK government has given the go-ahead to a unique hybrid project in the Irish Sea which will generate electricity from wind and then gas when wind dies down. Eclipse Energy expects its Ormonde project, off the coast of northwest England near Barrow in Furness, to produce most of its energy from […]

Production decline worsens at Mexico’s biggest oil field

Output could be halved in five years, crimping a major source of funding for public services. MEXICO CITY Production at Cantarell, the world’s second-largest oil complex, which provides about 60% of Mexico’s crude, averaged 1.78 million barrels a day in 2006. That’s a 13% drop from 2005, said Jesus Reyes Heroles, director of Petroleos Mexicanos, […]

Canada oil output to rise 9 pct in 2007: regulator

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) – Canadian oil production will grow 9 percent this year, the country’s national energy regulator said on Thursday, due to growing output from the Alberta oil sands and offshore oil projects. In its 2007 production estimate, posted on its Web site, the National Energy Board said Canadian oil output should climb to […]

The Desperation of George W. Bush

Last week, CommonDreams published a clever, hard-left article titled “Game Over: Thirty-Six Sure-Fire Signs That Your Empire Is Crumbling” by David Michael Green. One of them was, “You know your empire’s crumbling when a massive environmental nightmare is looming around the corner, and your emperor not only ignores it, but claims it isn’t real while […]

‘Doomsday vault’ to resist global warming effects

OSLO (AFP) – An Arctic “doomsday vault” aimed at providing mankind with food in case of a global catastrophe will be designed to sustain the effects of climate change, the project’s builders said as they unveiled the architectural plans. The top-security repository, carved into the permafrost of a mountain in the remote Svalbard archipelago near […]

Brazil to invest $5 billion into the ‘bioeconomy’

Brazil is rapidly becoming one of the most creative countries, forging a new kind of paradigm on how modern societies can become sustainable and what their role can be in a resource-constrained world. Famed for its environmentally friendly, compact urbanism (with the city of Curitiba being labelled “the world’s most liveable metropole”), its finetuned social […]

Seven reasons the uranium price will hit $100 this year

…#5: Peak Oil and Peak Natural Gas In 2006, global oil demand grew 0.9%, thanks to steady growth in China and the Middle East. The world used 84.5 million barrels of oil per day last year, according to the International Energy Agency. That In fact, the former Soviet Republic Belarus, which was hardest hit by […]

Virgin’s Branson offers $25 million global warming prize

LONDON (Reuters) – Airline tycoon Richard Branson announced on Friday a $25 million prize for the first person to come up with a way of scrubbing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere in the battle to beat global warming. Flanked by climate campaigners former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and British ex-diplomat Crispin Tickell, Branson […]

EU Bank: Quarrels Hindering Baltic Gas Pipeline

The European Investment Bank on Thursday said that quarrels between European Union member states were blocking a funding of a disputed Russian-German natural gas pipeline. Several EU member states were opposed to fund the project, said EIB vice president Matthias Kollatz-Ahnen. So far, the EU bank had not received an official application for financing and […]

‘Buck stops with me,’ says HSBC boss

Michael Geoghegan, chief executive of HSBC, the UK’s biggest bank, is taking personal responsibility for a growing problem in the bank’s US mortgage business which has forced analysts to cut their profit forecasts by as much as 10%. “The buck stops with me,” Mr Geoghegan said today, after the bank issued an unprecedented overnight warning […]

Lukoil likes Colombian oilfield

Russia’s Lukoil said Thursday that it has found an oilfield in Colombia that could contain as much as 100 million barrels of oil.Oil is Colombia’s largest legal export. But reserves are on the decline, with daily production off about 40 percent from the 1999 record. The country is desperately searching for new oil to avoid […]

High oil prices ensure strong economies across MENA

Economic growth across the MENA region is set to continue at high levels in 2007 and high oil prices will result in healthy fiscal and external surpluses for the oil-producing countries, concludes a recent report by Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services — “Data Watch: Middle East and African Sovereigns In 2007.” Public finances and external […]

Biofuel craze is water madness

If water were a globally traded commodity, with unmet demand in China and India reflected in its price, the world might shed its newfound craze for biofuels. It is bad enough that some of us need ethanol distilled in Scotland to lubricate our evenings. Growing corn to make ethanol to run sport-utility vehicles is downright […]

UAE ‘is an ideal place to tap solar energy’

European countries are mulling over plans to extract solar power from the Sahara desert as a source of renewable energy, leaving experts to ask why solar energy is not exploited in the Gulf, especially in power desalination plants. The UAE has cheap land, cheap labour and construction incentives making it an ideal market for solar […]

S-Af: A dirty energy cauldron

Energy provision in South Africa is in a cauldron. Internationally, 2 500 of the world’s leading climate scientists have found in a United Nations study that climate change is being fuelled by carbon emissions and that drastic cuts are necessary to reduce the chances of catastrophic weather patterns. Meanwhile, back home, a major study into […]

Report shows Scotland can build on its lead in subsea oil and gas

The huge opportunities for the subsea oil and gas industry, in which Scotland is the global leader, have been outlined in a new report.It highlights how subsea hardware providers are struggling to meet demand, with serious shortages of deep-water installation vessels.This sector is expected to double over the next five years.The Herald

Oil firm finances Chavez’s social and political ventures

Venezuela’s national oil company is buckling under the burden of financing President Hugo Chavez’s more than $9 billion a year in social and political ventures. Production at Petroleos de Venezuela is declining, and any major drop in oil prices or failure to reverse declining investment and production could lead to bankruptcy of the goose that […]

Big Oil cautious about clean-energy spending

Many renewable-energy advocates say that, for now, oil company commitment to alternative energy remains relatively small. “While the rhetoric is promising, in the end, they’re still oil and gas guys,” said Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at the Public Citizen watchdog group. The companies counter that they don’t want to dump money into […]

White House Budget to Cut Energy Research

President Bush’s 2008 budget, which was released earlier this week, proposes a record high amount of federal research and development (R&D) funding. But an increase in weapons-development funding is largely responsible for the record R&D spending: overall support for long-term research is down. And expenditures for energy-related R&D are less than the anticipated 2007 levels.Technology […]

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