4 oil majors in $7.1 billion North Sea investment

Four oil companies say they have won British government approval for a 4.5 billion pound ($7.1 billion) investment in developing a major oil field in the North Sea. BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips and Chevron are partners in the plan to install two new bridge-linked platforms in the Clair field, west of the Shetland Islands. Prime Minister […]

High bills force more UK homes into ‘fuel poverty’

Higher energy bills forced an extra 1m British households into “fuel poverty” in the space of a year, according to an official study. Calculations by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, published on Thursday, showed a rising number of households compelled to spend at least 10 per cent of their annual incomes on natural […]

Is the CFTC using a misleading argument about swaps regulation?

At some point next year, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission is expected to start regulating a market that has a notional value about seven times the size of the market the agency currently regulates. But whether that means the CFTC will have seven times the work or even if it should get a boost […]

New CNOOC oil leak found in China’s Bohai Bay

Chinese offshore oil and gas producer CNOOC Ltd. says it has suspended operation of an oil platform after finding a leak in one of its oil fields in the Bohai Bay. It is the latest in a series of offshore spills in the Bohai Bay that have raised an outcry among fishermen and environmentalists. CNOOC […]

Robert Rapier: How to Fix a Broken Biofuel Incentive System

The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program, created under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, mandated that increasing volumes of ethanol must be blended into the nation’s gasoline supplies. The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act accelerated and expanded the original mandates with the RFS2. The RFS2 also mandated the use of advanced biofuels: 100 million gallons of […]

Peak Oil & Climate Change

Peak Oil and Climate Change are set to be the defining issues for our civilisation and society in the years ahead. These issues will lead to a paradigm shift in geo political, social and economic relations on a local and global level and will inevitably lead to a more localised world. How can this be […]

To Make a light bulb

(there is an image in the story, see at URL) To make a light bulb I would like to have lights. Having lived off the grid for 30 years, ten of which was without electricity, I would like to have lights. During the ten years without electricity, I got my lights from kerosene lamps. I […]

Norway raises drill costs alarm

The head of Norway’s oil agency has sounded the alarm over high drilling costs on the country’s continental shelf that are putting a serious restraint on its ability to tap new reserves to reverse a production decline. At the same time, offshore operators are delaying drilling due to factors such as a lack of rig […]

Getting to 350 with a $2 Pocket Knife

“Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration is a cheap and rapid method of re-vegetating deserts and restoring climate balance to below 350 ppm. Vast areas of cleared agricultural land in arid lands retain an “underground forest” of living stumps and roots. By simply changing agricultural practices, this underground forest can re-sprout, at little cost, very rapidly and […]

Peak oil and agriculture issues (A Farm For The Future)

Peak oil Farm Extract fom : A Farm For The Future

Will U.S. Exploit Dubious Terror Case and Attack Iran?

The Obama administration plans to use an unproven accusation leveled against Iran to mount a new international sanctions campaign and possibly attack the country. On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced it had uncovered a plot by Iran to enlist a member of a Mexican drug cartel to kill Saudi Arabia’s envoy in Washington, D.C. The […]

Daniel Yergin Interview: “We certainly are moving past the era of cheap oil”

“The harnessing of energy is what makes possible the world as we know it. But can we bet on that for the future?” That’s the question Pulitzer-Prize winning author Daniel Yergin asks and attempts to answer in his new book The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World. Yergin is “cautiously optimistic” about […]

Heinberg: Our Problems are Resolvable In Principle

Here’s a fact that’s hard for most Americans to swallow: economic growth is over. Given the finite nature of our planet and its resources, the recent trend of global economic expansion was destined to end. No stimulus package or slashing of social programs is going to flip the economy back to an expansionary trajectory. We’ve hit […]

U.S. sanctions BP, Transocean, and Halliburton for Gulf oil spill

* US issues 15 notices of violations for spill * First time sanctions issued against contractors * Face fines of up to $35,000 a day, per incident   The U.S. offshore drilling regulator on Wednesday formally issued sanctions against BP and the major contractors for the 2010 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed […]

Medieval Smokestacks: Fossil Fuels in Pre-industrial Times

The history of energy use in human civilisation is generally summarised as follows: from Antiquity until the start of the Industrial Revolution, people made use of the manual labour of both animals and humans, as well as biomass, sun, water and wind. Next, all these renewable energy sources were replaced by fossil fuels: first coal, […]

The Peak Oil Crisis: Contagion

With every passing day it is becoming more apparent that the crisis of the depletion of cheap oil has become deeply enmeshed in the European debt crises. The sequence of events is well known. Greece’s economy is imploding; the government can no longer pay its bills without continuing bailouts from the EU; at some point […]

Economic theory and the Real Great Contraction

The contemporary debate over the future of natural resources features two competing theories of economics. The view that dominates all economic policy and theory today is rooted in the work of Adam Smith, published from 1759 to 1776. It holds that self-interest, if unimpeded by regulation, can be harnessed and trusted to produce socially desirable […]

A Slippery Peak – The New Oil Equation

New discoveries have disproved the idea that the world is running out of oil The idea of peak oil caught the world’s imagination a decade ago. Peak oil, the point in time when the maximum rate of global oil extraction is reached, after which the rate of production would get into terminal decline, was supposed […]

US must stop promoting biofuels to tackle world hunger

Global Hunger Index says US government support for corn ethanol was a factor in this year’s food price spikes America must stop promoting the production of biofuels if there is to be any real progress in addressing spiking global food prices and famine, such as seen in the Horn of Africa, an authoritative thinktank has warned. A new report, the Global […]

Shale Gas & the Re-Shaping of European Power Politics

As UK Shale Gas Could Shake Government Coalition points out, Russia clearly holds now the balance of power when it comes to European energy security. However, the current Eurozone economic crisis and the development of massive European shale gas reserves are set to combine to re-shape entirely the landscape of European power politics – no matter what the politicking […]

Dr Robert Hirsch: Weak World GDP Growth & “Peak Oil”

As we previously forecast, the decline in world oil production is likely to occur in the next 1-4 years, a year having passed since we forecast 2-5 years. Some believe that weak worldwide economic conditions will significantly extend the onset of decline. We believe that the delay will be essentially negligible. Because of the myriad of […]

On the cusp of collapse: Complexity, energy & the globalised econom

      The systems on which we rely for our financial transactions, food, fuel and livelihoods are so inter-dependent that they are better regarded as facets of a single global system. Maintaining and operating this global system requires a lot of energy and, because the fixed costs of operating it are high, it is […]

Nerves of Steel

Several weeks ago my attention was drawn to the many news clips of engineers climbing around on the Washington Monument looking for potential earthquake damage. My thoughts centered on the idea that they must have nerves of steel, titanium steel at that. It is one thing to be on a tall skyscraper separated safely from […]

Food Prices Set to Rise Further

 Food price volatility featuring high prices is likely to continue and probably increase next year, making poor farmers even more vulnerable to poverty and food insecurity, the global report on food insecurity released Monday by the United Nations’ three Rome-based food agencies predicts. Small, import-dependent countries, particularly in Africa, are especially at risk. “Many of […]

OPEC’s Arab Members Must Cut Crude Output, Iran’s Khatibi Says

Arab OPEC members that boosted crude exports to make up for reduced supply from Libya need to cut production as the North African nation increases output, Iran OPEC governor Mohammad Ali Khatibi said. Certain members should return to the production level they had prior to the Libyan crisis, in line with suggestions from the group’s […]

Jeremy Rifkin: The Third Industrial Revolution

The world is doomed to repeat four-year cycles of booms followed by crashes if we don’t get off oil, Jeremy Rifkin warned a Climate One audience in San Francisco on October 3. The solution, what he calls the Third Industrial Revolution, is the “Energy Internet,” a nervous system linking millions of small renewable energy producers. […]

China’s LNG demand questioned

The Australian has a stunningly suspect article downplaying the prospects for Australian LNG exports to China. Given that these LNG projects only get built when long term supply deals are signed with Asian customers (who often take an equity stake in the projects) its hard to understand the motive here (no pipeline from Russia seems […]

peak oil is here

The truth about peak oil

Oil Production of the Top Three IOCs

The above shows the liquids production of the three largest international oil companies (IOCs), as compiled from their annual reports.  You can see that by and large these companies are about the same size they were 15 years ago, in oil production terms (the partial exception is BP which managed to buy into a Russian […]

Truth in Energy

Speaking the truth can be painful. I had heard about Maryland’s proposed redistricting before, but hadn’t put two and two together until I read Outsider Bartlett faces political challenge of career. During a nearly two-decade career on Capitol Hill, the Western Maryland Republican has remained the consummate political outsider, eschewing Washington to drive home each night […]

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