Turning Seaweed into the Fuel of the Future

Seaweed holds promise as more than an ingredient in a purifying face mask or a maki roll. So say researchers at E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., which alongside Seattle-based Bio Architecture Lab (BAL) has secured $9 million from the Department of Energy to explore seaweed’s potential as a feedstock for biobutanol, an advanced […]

Kuwait, Iraq discuss border oilfields

Iraq and Kuwait are engaged in “technical negotiations” to strike a deal over production from border oilfields that have been at the heart of previous conflicts, a Kuwaiti oil official has said. “Consultations are ongoing to select the best mechanism that fairly guarantees the rights of both sides and serves their interests,” oil ministry assistant […]

China's booming car sales, falling gas usage stump analysts

Data ‘disconnect’ prompts suspicion, closer look at gasoline consumption HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — A sharp rise in Chinese car sales and vehicle ownership hasn’t been reflected in nationwide gasoline consumption this year, an anomaly that has some analysts scratching their heads in the search for answers. The disconnect has sparked a range of possible explanations, […]

Obama official slams oil industry

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar fired back at critics of the federal government’s oil and gas leasing program on Tuesday, saying the oil industry was acting

China's backing on Iran followed dire predictions

Two weeks before President Obama visited China, two senior White House officials traveled to Beijing on a “special mission” to try to persuade China to pressure Iran to give up its alleged nuclear weapons program. If Beijing did not help the United States on this issue, the consequences could be severe, the visitors, Dennis Ross […]

Peak Oil, the Decline of the North Sea and Britain's Energy Future

A paper to accompany the presentation to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil, Tuesday 24th November 2009 We are so often told about the problems of climate change by the various political parties in Britain, but in fact the changing climate is just one of a number of factors that we will have […]

Kurt Cobb: The trouble with apocalypse

The trouble with apocalypse is that most people have already seen it at the movie theater, watched it on television, read it in a book, or heard all about it from the pulpit. So inundated with the language of crisis are we that we have become immune to it. From the perspective of the historian […]

Peak oil review – Nov 23

1. Production and prices 2. Will China continue to grow? 3. Copenhagen 4. Uranium Quote of the Week The Briefs 1. Production and prices Oil prices started the week fairly strong with expectations that recent highs of $82 a barrel could be surpassed. By Wednesday, however, sentiment changed; with the dollar strengthening and the equity […]

CO2 levels keep rising as key climate talks loom

Scientist: Far from this mid-Pacific government observatory, negotiators from 192 nations gather in wintry Copenhagen, Denmark, next month to try to agree on steps to head off the worst of the climate disruptions researchers say will result if concentrations hit around 450 parts per million

Optimism for greentech sector points to more IPOs

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Purse strings are loosening, new bets are being placed, and cautious optimism has caught on in the green technology sector. With oil prices up sharply and the U.S. economy steady, the emerging green technology industry is seen moving back to a growth path from a sheer survival track, with factories being […]

Oil pricing agencies battle over benchmarks

LONDON (Reuters) – How much does a barrel of oil cost? With billions of dollars at stake, sometimes the answer depends who is doing the asking. The most visible answer is the figure flashing up on futures screens across the financial globe. In reality that is merely the top of a pricing pyramid based on […]

Oil price-play set to boost crude storage at sea

NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) – Offshore crude storage, which has declined sharply from record levels in April, may rise again in the U.S. Gulf as front-month U.S. oil futures trade at a steep discount to barrels for later delivery. The volume of crude oil stored in tankers globally has dipped to between 32 million and 42 […]

Detailing Accelerating Indicators of Climate Change In Last Three Years

A team of 26 climate scientists from Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States have published the Although the report is not an official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) document, many of its authors have served as lead authors of IPCC Assessment Reports in the past, and most […]

New Techniques Oil Companies are Using in Drilling for Oil

As the politics and philosophical arguments about Now well beyond mere exploration for oil, these seismic images help to regulate and maintain optimum functionality of wells in the deepest, most complex and complicated regions of the netherworld and ocean floor. This ability to visualize what is actually going on

Obama's planned attendance at Copenhagen turns up heat on Harper

President Barack Obama will pledge to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions “in the range of 17 per cent below 2005 levels” by 2020 when he attends next month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen, the White House said Wednesday. Confirmation that Obama will travel to the Danish capital triggered new calls for Prime Minister Stephen Harper […]

Solar Industry Starting to Heat Up the Market

After years of over promising and under delivering, the solar industry is finally starting to show some interesting developments that have the potential to make solar power as cheap as fossil fuel on a cost-per-watt basis within five years. Getting us to that state, called grid parity, would require solar companies to produce power for […]

Naomi Klein on Climate Debt

Why Rich Countries Should Pay Reparations To Poor Countries For The Climate Crisis. With the Copenhagen climate summit two weeks away, best-selling journalist Naomi Klein examines the grass-roots movement behind the climate debate proposal that argues all the costs associated with adapting to a more hostile ecology AMY GOODMAN: We turn to the best-selling author […]

Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away

I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that […]

Alaska to auction petroleum rights in disputed Arctic waters

The Alaskan government has announced plans to auction oil and gas exploration rights in a disputed section of the Beaufort Sea along the Yukon-Alaska border The department’s admission came after the NDP’s critic for northern affairs

FACTBOX – Attacks in the Gulf of Guinea

(Reuters) – Pirates attacked an oil tanker off the coast of Benin on Tuesday, killing a Ukrainian officer and stealing the contents of the ship’s safe, the head of the West African country’s navy said. Africa’s Gulf of Guinea nations have been struggling with mounting threats from piracy and kidnappings in the area, home to […]

The Case Against An Energy Comeback

Demand needs more than recovery to surge. The accelerating rise in commodities prices may leave energy behind. Even if the economy recovers next year as expected, energy consumption in the industrialized world fell so far, so fast, that it will struggle just to meet 2007 levels. Barclays Capital estimates that oil demand in the Organization […]

The oil-economy connection

Saudi Arabia This is an idea worth exploring further. Before the recent peak in oil prices in July last year most peak oil commentators believed that the sky was the limit for oil prices. Indeed, economic modeling in a CSIRO report released only one month before the $147/barrel oil price peak of July 2008

Jeff Rubin: Why the U.S., China are about to get divorced

The U.S. It

Energy Push Spurs Shift in U.S. Science

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — The Obama administration’s push to solve the nation’s energy problems, a massive federal program that rivals the Manhattan Project, is spurring a once-in-a-generation shift in U.S. science. The government’s multibillion-dollar push into energy research is reinvigorating 17 giant U.S.-funded research facilities, from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory here to the Lawrence […]

T. Boone Pickens: End the Mideast Oil Addiction

It’s high time we had a plan to replace imported oil with domestic natural gas. My father once said that a fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan. Well, when it comes to energy–especially oil–China is certainly giving the U.S. a drubbing. The U.S. is the largest economy in the world, […]

Peak Gold, Easier to Model than Peak Oil? – Part I

This is a guest post by Jean Laherr Note: This post contains close to 50 images amounting to 2 Mbytes of data. http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5989

Scientists announce proof of mega-droughts

FRESNO, Calif. – While Californians worry about the three-year drought dragging on another season, researchers say climate change soon could create much longer dry spells – lasting decades or even centuries. Scientists from the University of California, Davis, this month announced the first proof of such mega-droughts after studying mineral formations in caves along the […]

Peak Oil : IEA's predictions seeming more and more infeasible with time

On November 9, the Uppsala University in Sweden published a report titled “The Peak of the Oil Age – The Uppsala World Energy Outlook”. The report performs an analysis of the oil production forecast done by the International Energy Agency in 2008. One day before the release of the IEA 2009 edition of its World […]

Kunstler: Courting Convulsion

…What’s going on in the US economy is a slow-motion convulsion from which we will emerge as a very different nation with a different economy. The wild irresponsibility of the media in pretending otherwise is only going to make the convulsion worse, more painful, more socially and politically destructive. The convulsion can be described with […]

Peak Oil Reality: Industry Experts Offer Growing Drumbeat of Supply Warnings

DENVER, Nov 24, 2009 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ —-Newly-released videotaped remarks reinforce statements by senior petroleum industry officials about looming world oil supply constraints Groups and individuals speaking out about forthcoming world oil supply challenges are frequently stereotyped as a fringe element with little knowledge about the oil industry. But their warnings are increasingly supported by […]

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