Why Brazil Struggles to Produce More Oil

Brazil floats on a sea of oil. So why have its oil stocks sunk so badly? It is nearly six years since initial discoveries of vast oil reserves buried under a thick layer of salt beneath the seabed off Brazil’s coast. State-controlled Petroleo Brasileiro, or Petrobras, is sole operator, with a minimum 30% stake in […]

The Impact of China’s Rising Assertion in South China Sea

The South China Sea dispute between China and several of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries has brewed for many years, but the recent face-off with Vietnam and the Philippines have made one thing clear: Beijing is becoming more assertive with regards to its territorial claims. On June 25, 2012, state-backed China National […]

The shale gas-ification of oil

Everyone now knows what happened in the US’ natural-gas sector. Strong Henry Hub prices brought a costly, tricky method of gas extraction into the mainstream. Just a few years after US politicians and forecasters were fretting about dwindling reserves and firms rushed to build liquefied natural gas import terminals to capitalise on the inevitable rise […]

Are Natural Gas Liquids as Good as Oil?

Technical details sometimes turn out to be just that – details. Sometimes, though, they turn out to be much more. A longstanding technical debate over how to think about natural gas liquids (NGLs) may be in the process of moving from something marginal to something that really matters. NGLs are the light hydrocarbons other than […]

Michael T. Klare on Antiwar Radio

Michael T. Klare, professor and author, is interviewed on Antiwar Radio discussing his recent article “Is Barack Obama Morphing Into Dick Cheney?”, the Bush and Obama administrations’ striking policy similarities on oil geopolitics, peak oil theory and the disappearance of “easy” oil. Includes discussion of Cheney’s National Energy Policy of 2001, which advised more oil […]

Marcellus Shale Study Shows Fluids Seeping Into Pennsylvania Drinking Water Supplies

New research has concluded that salty, mineral-rich fluids deep beneath Pennsylvania’s natural gas fields are likely seeping upward thousands of feet into drinking water supplies. Though the fluids were natural and not the byproduct of drilling or hydraulic fracturing, the finding further stokes the red-hot controversy over fracking in the Marcellus Shale, suggesting that drilling […]

Endgame in Syria and Iran Risks War with China and Russia

Third World War looms as reserve currency petrodollar teeters. Dominique de Kevelioc de Bailleul of Beacon Equity Research predicts that the coming conflict with Syria will be the trigger event that takes down the U.S. dollar. A military response to Syria and Iran would likely draw in Russia and China, he warns, and the result […]

World Population Day Notes Problems of Population Growth

July 11 is World Population Day, an annual observance to educate the public about the problems of overpopulation and continuing population growth. It grew out of the public interest in Five Billion Day in 1987 when the global population reached five billion people. A quarter century later, world population now exceeds 7 billion and is […]

How Many Years Of Oil Do We Have Left?

Probably in excess of 50 years before oil production drops below half what is currently. Counting natural gas in total hydrocarbons, probably 90 to 140 years before total hydrocarbon use drops to below half what it is currently. It is likely that this will be enough time to transition to renewables, nuclear, and biomass, with […]

Will Higher Oil Prices End Economic Growth?

This transcript is automatically generated Oil fell today but. It’s jumped by nearly ten bucks a barrel in less than a week and our next guest says that the rise of oil prices will lead to the end of economic growth globally. Maybe that’s not a bad thing Jeff Rubin author of the book the […]

Nicole Foss: Monbiot Is Ignoring the Critical Paradox of Unconventional Supplies

George Monbiot recently made a major about-face on his peak oil stance, on the grounds that unconventional oil represents a new reality. The basis of his u-turn is a recent report on unconventional oil by Leonardo Maugeri, (former) oil executive at Italy’s Eni, published at Harvard University, where Maugeri’s a Senior Fellow at the John […]

Iran sets up private oil export to beat sanctions

An official says Iran has set up a private oil export group in an attempt to bypass a European ban on buying Iranian oil. The ban is part of Western sanctions aimed at pressuring Iran over its nuclear program. Hasan Khosrowjerdi, head of the Iranian oil products exporters union, said Monday the first contract for […]

Peak Oil: Another Dose Of Crude Oil Reality

Leapfrogging now past fossil fuels to renewable energy is not just desirable but probably inescapable. The only question is whether we as a society will do it with a focused plan for a rapid transition or whether the transition will be chaotic and marked by violent swings in the economy as the world lurches from […]

Coalition Led by Pro-Western Official Claims Lead in Libya’s Election

A coalition led by a Western-educated political scientist appeared on Sunday to be beating Islamist parties in Libya’s first election of the post-Qaddafi era, standing apart from an overwhelming Islamist wave sweeping across neighboring Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprisings. The preliminary results, characterized by independent monitors and party […]

Saudi Arabia to remain biggest producer of oil

Saudi Arabia, the biggest oil producer in the world with a proven reserve of 264 billion barrels, could continue oil supplies for the next 80 years at the current production levels, the Kuwait-based Diplomatic Center for Strategic Studies (DCSS) said in a study. Saudi Arabia retains 38.7 percent of world oil reserves whereas the shares […]

The Collapsing US Economy and the end of the world

In a recent column, “Can The World Survive Washington’s Hubris,” I promised to examine whether the US economy will collapse before Washington in its pursuit of world hegemony brings us into military confrontation with Russia and China. This is likely to be an ongoing subject on this site, so this column will not be the […]

Protest Turns Deadly In Qatif As Saudis Use Live Ammo On Protesting Shi’ites

Remember Qatif – the “weakest” Saudi authoritarian link, whose daily protests, many of them violent, threatened to topple the government last spring when soaring global food inflation set the MENA region on fire and led to the overthrow of numerous regimes in the Mediterranean rim? It’s back, only this time not based on food price […]

Work starts at 2 Iran’s oil fields to produce 700,000 bpd

A Chinese company has invested $20 billion in Iran’s Yadavaran and Azadegan oil fields, which are projected to produce 700,000 barrels of oil per day when they reach peak capacity, Iranian Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi announced on Sunday. “After 10 to 15 years of negotiations with the Chinese side, agreements were struck for the development […]

How changing the definition of oil has deceived both policymakers and the public

Everyone knows that world oil production has been running between 88 and 89 million barrels per day (mbpd) this year because government, industry and media sources tell us so. As it turns out, what everyone knows is wrong. It’s wrong not because the range quoted above can’t be found in official sources. It’s wrong because […]

Tech Talk – the “best of the rest” in Saudi Arabia

The discussion that swirls over the future of global oil supplies often seems to focus, from the side of those who suggest that there is no problem, on the large volumes of oil that still remain in place around the world. The critical point however is not that this oil exists, but rather the rate […]

Natural gas sets record by matching coal’s output

King Coal is meeting its match: natural gas. Power plants fired by natural gas have set a new record by producing as much electricity in the United States as those run by coal, long the nation’s dominant power producer. Preliminary data for April show that natural gas plants generated the same share of U.S. electricity […]

Efficiency, conservation, and the Jevons Paradox

Given the preponderance of government energy policies aimed at promoting technical efficiency, a careful consideration of the Jevons Paradox is in order. I’ve spent some time this summer reading about William Stanley Jevons, one of the three 19th-century economists co-credited with sparking the marginal revolution, and especially Jevon’s book The Coal Question. Most recently I’ve been reading […]

You Can’t Get There from Here

If I told you you can’t get there from here, you’d probably laugh at me. If I insisted that you can’t, you’d probably, to humour me, pull out the road atlas and point out the route. But wait a moment. What if you couldn’t drive? We lived in Europe (in the Netherlands) for a year. […]

There Will Never Be Enough Jobs In America Again

Well, we just had another bad jobs report.  The U.S. economy created just 80,000 new jobs during the month of June.  Normally, about 125,000 new jobs need to be created every month just to keep up with population growth.  So it is a bit odd that the official unemployment rate did not rise above 8.2%. […]

Population: An issue that has been long neglected

When Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968, the world population, then 3bn, was growing at an unprecedented rate due to spectacular declines in mortality levels. Unless countries decided also to “talk fertility down”, as Australian demographer John Caldwell put it, rapid population growth was poised to undermine development. Many countries, particularly in Asia […]

Resilience through simplification: revisiting Tainter’s theory of collapse

A society or other institution can be destroyed by the cost of sustaining itself. – Joseph Tainter Resilience through Simplification: Revisiting Tainter’s Theory of Collapse Samuel Alexander[1]   1. Introduction In 1988 Joseph Tainter published his seminal work, The Collapse of Complex Societies, in which he presented an original theory of social complexity that he […]

Civilization and the Price of Oil

I attended a lecture and workshop by Arizonan Guy McPherson last weekend that hit me like a kick in the head. McPherson, who posts at Nature Bats Last and recently published Walking Away from Empire: a Personal Journey, is on tour in New Zealand. According to McPherson and a growing number of prominent energy and […]

Oil and Illusions

The flaws of bad government, oppression, injustice and corruption, etc., can be masked by an unearned windfall. Take Saudi Arabia and its oil, for example, or the United States and its oil, which was first sucked from its own soil and sea, then everybody else’s, thanks to its status as an empire. With oil, even […]

Iran plans to sell oil via consortium, evade ban

Iran has reached agreements with European refiners to sell some of its oil through a private consortium, an official said on Saturday, a move designed to circumvent sanctions intended to put pressure on Tehran to halt its disputed nuclear programme. The head of the oil products exporters’ union said the agreement between the exporters’ union, […]

GrowthBusters: World Population Day

World Population Day is observed every year on July 11. We at GrowthBusters have created a new website, www.worldpopulationday.org, in order to bring more attention to the fact the world is overpopulated. As I explain on the About page, too many leaders and organizations if they take note of the day at all tapdance around […]

« Previous Page — Next Page »

LATEST NEWS HEADLINES

• Why the IEA is Wrong About Peak Oil Demand
• Did we inadvertently speed global warming?  
• Venezuela’s Oil Monopoly Eases
• Why Germany is Choosing Natural Gas Over Nuclear Power
• U.S. coal-fired electricity generation decreased in 2022 and 2023

• America Cracks Down on Methane Emissions from Oil and Gas Facilities
• Meet America’s Newest Oil Trader Extraordinaire: Joe Biden
• Is It Time To Refill America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve?
• Oil prices set to end year 10% lower as demand concerns snap winning streak
• What’s Driving America’s New Oil and Gas Boom?
• China’s peak oil demand bombshell eviscerates Danielle Smith’s energy strategy