Cement flows for permanent plug of BP’s Gulf well

Crews pumped cement into BP’s blown-out oil well thousands of feet below the sea bottom Saturday, working to finally seal the runaway well. Engineers initially had planned to pump in mud before the cement, but a BP spokesman said that wasn’t necessary because there was no pressure building inside the well. BP expects the well […]

Scarcity: The Fountain of Innovation

With concerns about peak oil, peak water, peak real estate, peak financial markets – and just about peak everything else – scarcity is on the minds of business and political leaders alike. The panel members come at scarcity from diverse disciplines. I come at it from the perspective of environmental sustainability, where scarcity has been […]

Geothermal Energy Could Provide All the Energy

There is a solution for the world’s insatiable energy needs. It is CO2-free and safe. And it’s located right under our feet. Ever since Jules Verne wrote in 1864 about a trip to the Earth’s interior, people have dreamed of bringing up heat from the centre of the planet. So far we have only scratched […]

Researchers to Fight Global Warming by Shooting Sulfates into Stratosphere

Models show a 90 percent reduction of the magnitude of climate change. Researchers at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology are looking to optimize climate change reduction by injecting sulfates into the stratosphere. George Ban-Weiss, lead author of the study, along with his team of Carnegie scientists, have studied how the injection of aerosols […]

BHP Boss: Time For A Carbon Tax

The SMH has an article on a recent speech by BHP CEO Marius Kloppers, calling for a carbon tax to be introduced to Australia – BHP boss dumps on future of coal. THE world’s largest miner, BHP Billiton, has weighed into the climate change debate, warning that Australia should ”look beyond coal” and towards other […]

The Fake Fire Brigade – How Can Renewable Sources Support Our Current Energy Delivery Expectations?

In this post, we try to develop a systemic picture of electricity, using some of our European models.  We will put a specific emphasis on wind power, as wind is seen as the single most relevant renewable source, and many plans involve a share of approximately 20%-30% of total power consumption within the next 10-20 […]

Cuba’s Peak Oil Experience: Looking Back Over 20 Years

Mario Arrastia Avila, a Physicist in Cuba’s energy transition agency Cuba Energia, spoke in San Francisco last week about the lessons of Cuba’s transition after its own Peak Oil disaster struck in the early 1990s. At the time, the Soviet Union’s collapse meant that North Korea, Cuba, and other communist satellites faced the end of […]

The Peak Oil Crisis: Is $50 Oil in the Offing?

In the last few weeks, there has been an upswing in articles emanating from prestigious commentators, such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Fortune magazine, which attempt to debunk the notion that the world’s oil supplies may start to fall in the next few years. There is of course nothing new in the AIE’s […]

Is the World Prepared for the Next Food Crisis

Food riots that took a toll on a number of developing countries in 2008, now appear to be repeating, with thirteen people killed in Mozambique in the wake of rising bread prices in early September. One must thus ask whether the world is better prepared today to deal with high international food prices and to […]

PEAK Silver coming…this Decade

What else comes with Peak Oil? A peak in everything that depends on oil, which brings us to the minerals and other resources that we secure from the environment. Again, this is not a story of “running out” — this is a story where things get just a little bit harder and a little bit […]

Gov’t: BP Well to Be Sealed – for Good – Sunday

The U.S. government’s point man on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill said Wednesday that BP’s blown-out well is expected to be permanently sealed and declared dead by Sunday, nearly five months after a rig explosion set off the disaster. National Incident Commander Thad Allen told reporters gathered at a seafood distributor in Kenner, Louisiana, […]

China’s Stronghold on Rare Earth Metals

China’s got the Pentagon shaking in its boots — and for good reason. With more than 97% of the world’s rare earth metals produced in China, its recent announcement of a 72% reduction in exports could screw our military… The Pentagon is scrambling for alternatives, but they don’t really have time to scramble. Rare earth […]

Germany, Britain brace for peak oil

Why are the folks at the Bundeswehr Transformation Centre, a German military think-tank, already planning for peak oil? Probably for the same reason the British Department of Energy, in concert with the Bank of England and the British Department of Defense, has ordered similar—and equally secret—studies on its impact. Despite repeated government assurances to the […]

Wind Energy’s Real Problems

Several studies have concluded that “wind-generated electricity likely won’t result in any reduction in carbon emissions – or that they’ll be so small as to be almost meaningless.” The subsidy-dependent wind industry has gone to great lengths to counter that thesis. Rather than respond to the fusillade of ad hominem attacks and misinformation that have […]

The Future is Rated “B”

many of my readers seem persuaded that the future is either Mad Max or Waterworld. As far as they are concerned, there just aren’t any other options. What’s more, some people have even tried to venture a guess as to which of the two it shall be by watching what I do. I live on […]

Peak Coal Could Strike by 2011 – Reuters

A recent study predicts existing coalmines around the world will reach peak production as early as next year, with peak production levels cut in half by the turn of the century. This runs counter to current estimates of global coal reserves, which researchers from the University of Texas in Austin and the University of California […]

Oil is still king

Traditional fossil fuels will continue to rule the global energy mix for the next 30 to 40 years, the president and CEO of Saudi Aramco told the World Energy Congress during yesterday’s keynote address at the Palais des congres. The growth of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency technologies will be “slow and uneven” due […]

Have we passed the point of Peak Oil?

In commemoration of OPEC’s 50th anniversary and the fact that, in recent days, I’ve read articles in the mainstream media like this one printed in Macleans that do their best to debunk the idea that the issue of peak oil is still an issue that faces us, I thought I’d take a look at the world’s […]

Which Comes First – Peak Everything or Peak Us?

Are humans capable of influencing which comes first — peak everything or peak us? There are plentiful signs that the planet’s human population –- after centuries of explosive growth — will crest within the next couple of generations. A mid-range  best guess for the peak remains roughly 9 billion people. (As Gary Peters, one of my […]

Forget Oil, Worry About Phosphorus

The world’s agriculture depends on a mineral that is declining in production and is controlled by a cartel of companies. Troubling, ain’t it? Modern farming methods depend increasingly on fossil fuels and major plant nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. We know that peak oil is fast approaching, if it has not already arrived. This isn’t […]

Maxwell Forecasts Peak Oil in Seven Years

Respected oil analyst and oil industry veteran Charles Maxwell (nicknamed the “Dean of Oil Analysts”) has forecast peak oil by 2017 or 2018: Bracing For Peak Oil Production By Decade’s End His prediction is not so remarkable, as is where he made his prediction. The prediction was in Forbes, which has often scoffed at the […]

Kunstle: Scary People, Scary Times

In that order. The scary people have already started coming out of the woodwork. The times lately have been mostly uncertain, but soon they’ll turn scary, too, as it becomes clearer that the people running things in the USA have no idea what’s going on or what they’re going to do about it — and […]

Interview with Bob Hirsch on his team’s new book—“The Impending World Energy Mess”

Andrews: In your earlier work dating back at least five years, you resisted forecasting a time frame for peak oil. There seems to be a bit of a change on that front in your book. Care to comment on that? Bob Hirsch: In years past, there was considerable uncertainty in my mind about when the […]

Scientists Find Thick Coat of Oil on Gulf Sea Floor

Researchers say they’ve found patches of oil believed to be from the BP leak on the Gulf of Mexico sea floor. Some of these are two inches thick. University of Georgia researcher Samantha Joye (JOY) says she and her colleagues have found oil as much as 80 miles from the Deepwater Horizons well. She says […]

Biologist looks at consumerism and our world

Q: What do you think is the biggest sustainability issue our nation faces? Consumption. We are a nation driven by consumption. The world’s richest 10 percent account for 59 percent of the world’s consumption. The poorest 10 percent account for 0.5 percent. The U.S. has about 5 percent of the world’s population and accounts for […]

Major Oil Discovery Offshore Ghana

Tullow announced that the Owo-1 exploration sidetrack in the Deepwater Tano license offshore Ghana has significantly extended the column of high quality light oil discovered by the Owo-1 well. Results of drilling, wireline logs and samples of reservoir fluids confirm that Owo is a major new oil field. The Owo-1 well encountered 53 meters of […]

Rigzone: OPEC to Enter 50th Year with Diminished Role

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is set to mark its 50th anniversary on Tuesday not with a grand ceremony, but with a simple press conference at its Vienna headquarters. This might seem surprising for the world’s only oil cartel, but the modest commemoration is fitting in view of the group’s diminished importance and […]

Federal Agencies Outline Plans for Curbing Fossil Fuels, Emissions

The White House released federal agencies’ sustainability plans yesterday, providing the first detailed glimpse of how the government plans to decrease its greenhouse gas emissions over the next 10 years. The basics among the 50-plus government agencies and offices are similar: Many plan to cut direct emissions by making infrastructure improvements, reducing fossil fuel use […]

Peak Everything: An Interactive Look At How Much Of Everything Is Left

Scientific American has done a great summary of peak commodity levels as well as depletion projections for some of the most critical resources in the world including oil, gold, silver copper, not to mention renewable water, as well as estimating general food prices over the next half century. Generally speaking, regardless of whether one believes […]

9/11 – A Fourth Turning Perspective

The four turnings comprise a quaternal social cycle of growth, maturation, entropy, and death (and rebirth).  In a spring like High, a society fortifies and builds and converges in an era of promise.  In a summer like Awakening, it dreams and plays and exults in an era of euphoria.  In an autumnal Unraveling, it harvests […]

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