Reconstructing Climate Change

Through the whole year of 2009, building up to the failed Copehagen “climate summit”, climate change was heavily promoted by a small but powerful group of OECD political leaders and their corporate, press and media elites as a major challenge to the planet and to our way of life. It was also the big signal […]

Unconventional gas resources changing more than markets

The market changes become more obvious every day. Resource potential is a diminishing concern. The main driver of supply is drilling economics. Only a few years ago, the dominant assumptions were that operators had to drill feverishly just to hold production steady and that LNG imports had to expand to meet whatever demand growth occurred. […]

Federal officials won’t talk about blowout preventer

The Justice Department won’t say if the blowout preventer that failed to stop oil from gushing from BP’s undersea well into the Gulf of Mexico is on its way to shore. Spokeswoman Hannah August declined to comment today. The 50-foot, 300-ton device, which was lifted to the surface Saturday, is expected to be analyzed at […]

Hot rocks and high hopes

OVER the course of the next ten years a company called Geodynamics, based in Queensland, Australia, is planning to drill as many as 90 wells, each 4,500-5,000 metres deep, in the Cooper Basin, a desert region in South Australia with large energy reserves. But the company is not drilling for oil or gas. It is […]

Kunstler: In The Headlights

The toils of summer are bygone now. The days grow shorter and America stands in the darkling road of its own prospects like a dumb animal frozen in the blinding light of approaching fury. The White House must be a strange place these days with the management of the USA turned over to astrologasters, alchemists, […]

Australia: Running on empty?

The most influential progressive think tank in Australia, The Australia Institute based in Canberra, recently published a paper on peak oil and its importance for the government. Summary of the content and conclusions: Like climate change, the possibility of peak oil poses an uncomfortable challenge to citizens and governments alike in the 21st century. ‘Peak […]

A world in collapse

Take a look at any measure of the fundamental health of the planetary ecosystem on which we are dependent: topsoil loss, chemical contamination of soil and water, species extinction and reduction in biodiversity, the state of the world’s oceans, unmanageable toxic waste problems, and climate change. Take a look at the data, and the news […]

I Can Save the World Better Than You, Nyah Nyah!: A Short History of the Peak Oil Movement and Reflections on Wizards, Transition and the Interstices of Reason

In this Corna… John Michael Greer, owner (by a whisker over Bob Waldrop) of the finest beard in Peak Oildom, Archdruid, moral descendent of Toynbee and Gibbon, considerer of declines in centuries, not weekends. No Zombies for Greer – we are Rome, and we might as well deal with it, dammit. And in this Corna…Rob […]

PREPARING FOR AND LEARNING TO SURVIVE THE COMING PERFECT STORM

[Jim Pupulva interviews Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth] I’m not convinced they want the public to know anything about it [peak oil] at all. I think they prefer to keep anything that might be remotely alarming under wraps because they don’t want the public to be spooked, I mean we’re already pretty much on a […]

Wall St. firm behind slow solar pace on federal lands?

ROACH DRY LAKE, Nev. — Not a light bulb’s worth of solar electricity has been produced on the millions of acres of public desert set aside for it. Not one project to build glimmering solar farms has even broken ground. Instead, five years after federal land managers opened up stretches of the Southwest to developers, […]

Exponentially on purpose: a century-and-a-half of ignored warnings

The peak oil debate is a case of history repeating itself: people have been ignoring warnings about exponential use of finite resources for a century and a half. The concept of peak oil, based on the pioneering work of geologist M. King Hubbert (right), states that world oil production will one day reach a natural […]

The simple future beyond oil: The convergence of our economic and ecological futures and the importance of change

The human labour equivalent to the energy in [a] barrel of oil, even assuming a low rate of pay such as £5.80/hour (minimum wage), would cost £145,000 – or about $210,250/barrel! In other words, 99.97% of the equivalent labour value of oil is “free”, and so our use of energy can be seen as constituting […]

A century-and-a-half of ignored warnings

[A great history lesson, Pops] The peak oil debate is a case of history repeating itself: people have been ignoring warnings about exponential use of finite resources for a century and a half. The concept of peak oil, based on the pioneering work of geologist M. King Hubbert (right), states that world oil production will one […]

Independent: The energy challenge

We must harness resources such as wind and nuclear power to create a sustainable and low-carbon economy Britain faces an energy challenge in the coming decades which is unprecedented, and all the more formidable for being double-faced. It would be bad enough if the challenge were just to keep the lights on. Four factors will […]

Grist: Latest Gulf oil well explosion, but what does it say about offshore drilling?

f we hadn’t spent the summer watching crude gush into the Gulf, no one outside the industry would have noticed or cared much about Thursday’s explosion on a Mariner Energy oil platform.  No serious injuries, no spreading slick. But everyone did notice, and it reminded us that no matter how much BP and the rest of […]

PEAK DENIAL ABOUT PEAK OIL

It is par for the course that with oil hovering between $70 and $80 per barrel Americans have continued to buy SUVs and Trucks at a rapid pace. Politicians don’t have constituents screaming at them because gas is $4.00 per gallon, so it is no longer an issue for them. They need to focus on […]

US makes bio-fuel research grants

WASHINGTON, Sept. 2, 2010 — Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced research awards under a joint DOE-USDA program aimed at improving and accelerating genetic breeding programs to create plants better suited for bioenergy production.  The $8.9 million investment is part of the Obama Administration’s broader effort to diversify the nation’s energy […]

Guardian: Environmentalist’s Paradox

We hear lots of concerned chatter these days – not least, here on this site – about peak oil, peak water, deforestation, resource depletion and the like, but a popular riposte offered by those doubting such concerns is something commonly referred to as the “Environmentalist’s Paradox”. The argument goes thus: “Why, despite resource depletion and the degradation of […]

WSJ: Oil Price Ignores Long-Term Supply Worries

By Angus Mcdowall You could be excused for seeing a grim metaphor for the death of the oil age in the scenes of destruction visited on the U.S. Gulf coast this summer. However, production from the ocean floor is growing more quickly than from any other type of reserve and is supposed to allay concerns […]

Feds: Don’t drink contaminated water in Wyo. town

People shouldn’t drink water from 40 wells in and around this central Wyoming farming and ranching community, federal officials said Tuesday. The announcement by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services coincided with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency releasing its latest findings from testing water wells in the Pavillion area. Meanwhile, Encana Oil & […]

Chron: New rules for oil trading.

Even if you have just your little toe dipped in the oil trading markets, you know there’s change afoot. The the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed this year may have been triggered by the implosion of the mortgage securitization markets, but it expands regulation of all over-the-counter trading — including energy commodities. […]

Leaked Study on Peak Oil Warns of Severe Global Energy Crisis

This week a study on peak oil by a German military think tank was leaked on the Internet. The document shows that the German government is closely studying the issue of peak oil, and is aware of the potential for serious consequences as oil production declines. The study is reminiscent of the Hirsch Report, commissioned by […]

The dirty topic of peak oil: get ready to reduce your reliance

Wouldn’t it be funny if we spent so long arguing about what to do about climate change that we ran out of cheap oil first? No, it wouldn’t really, it would be catastrophic. But given the government’s delay in producing an Energy White Paper and the steady backsliding on the need to actually reduce our […]

PeakOil.com Weekly Supply Report

27-Aug Unleaded Forecast / Actual Imports 1.10 /1.14 Production 9.61 /9.62 Products Supplied 9.35 /9.39 Demand 10.42 /10.79 Inventory Change 2.05 /-0.20 I had to post the validation of my little unleaded forecast above, which showed that I was within .05 on all of the sub-forecasts, but 2 million barrels of unleaded appeared from nowhere […]

Grid-Scale Energy Storage Market to Reach $35 Billion by 2020

Pike Research The stationary energy storage sector will play an increasingly larger role in the electricity grid of the future.  Demand is being driven by several key trends including the proliferation of renewable energy from variable sources such as wind and solar, the expansion of utility smart grid initiatives, and the introduction of plug-in hybrid […]

TOD: A Summary of Adam Brandt’s “Review of Mathematical Models of Future Oil Supply”

Dr. Adam Brandt of Stanford University’s Department of Energy Resources Engineering sent us a copy of a paper he wrote called Review of mathematical models of future oil supply: Historical overview and synthesizing critique. There seem to be quite a few things of interest, so I have summarized the paper, since the author did not have […]

David Suzuki: Our obsession with private automobiles is unsustainable

Are we driving ourselves into oblivion? Or will new automobile technology save us from the environmental impact of the fossil-fuelled tanks we use to get around? On the extreme end of the consequences of our auto-centric societies, we need only to look at the recent massive traffic jam in China that stretched for 100 kilometres […]

Fossil Fuels vs. The Public Interest

Scitizen The fossil fuel industry often pretends to have the public’s best interests in mind. The operative word is “pretends.” Fossil fuel executives get out of bed in the morning thinking about two things: 1) Making sure they can sell all their current in-ground inventory of fossil fuels at a profitable price and 2) finding […]

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