Richard Branson on peak oil

Peak Oil & Peak Everything Lecture at Cornel

Iraq Claims Billion Barrel Oil Discovery

Iraq said Sunday it has discovered deposits of crude, equivalent to one billion barrels of oil after the first exploration work by state-owned firms in almost 30 years. The deposits were found after exploration in Maysan province, in southern Iraq near the border with Iran, and could potentially make a significant addition to Baghdad’s already […]

Saudi Arabia, Iraq Cut Oil Exports in November

Saudi Arabia exported 1.7 percent less crude in November than in the previous month, while Iraq and five other OPEC producers also curbed shipments, according to the Joint Organizations Data Initiative. The kingdom, the largest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, shipped 7.15 million barrels a day in November as it reduced monthly […]

Political transformation in the age of energy scarcity

A professor friend of mine recently asked his freshman writing class what makes civilization possible. The students puzzled for a minute and then someone said, “Cities.” Of course, that’s really just the definition of civilization. “But what makes those cities possible?” the professor asked. No one could really come up with an answer. Here were […]

50 Shocking Questions That You Should Ask To Anyone That Is Not A Prepper Yet

Share this list of shocking questions with everyone you know that needs to wake up.  Sometimes asking good questions is the best way to get someone that you care about to understand something.  When I attended law school, I became very familiar with something called “the Socratic method”.  It is a method that has been […]

Algeria Hostages Dead

Algerian bomb squads scouring a gas plant where Islamist militants took dozens of foreign workers hostage found “numerous” new bodies on Sunday as they searched for explosive traps left behind by the attackers, a security official said, a day after a bloody raid ended the four-day siege of the remote desert refinery. The official, who […]

Meet Mike, The Most Radioactive Fish Ever From Fukushima

Almost two years after the awful nuclear disaster occurred, a fish caught near Fukushima on Friday January 18th had a record-breaking level of radioactive contamination over 2500x the legal limit. TEPCO measured ‘Mike the Murasoi’ at 254,000 becquerels per kilogram (with the limit for edible seafood at 100 becquerels). As Le Monde reports, the previous […]

The Heated Debate Over Shale Gas

One of the few bright spots in the American economy that almost everyone seems to agree on is the energy sector. Advancements in drilling technologies have made it possible to extract vast quantities of oil and gas from shale formations. The resultant boom in natural gas production drove prices to a decade low back in […]

Lower output target for Iraq

In the World Energy Outlook 2012 report the IEA presents its view of future crude oil production (see the figure). With decreases of over 2 million barrels per day (Mb/d) by 2035 both Russia and China have passed Peak Oil. In other nations where crude oil production has previously reached Peak Oil, the decline in […]

Arup launch peak oil report

John Miles of Arup’s introduction to the Peak Oil

Peak Oil Doom In Context

…Peak Oil catastrophism is largely a manifestation of our primary cultural myth: that all things end with suffering, death, and then resurrection. Belief in apocalypse is programmed into western civilization. Given our heritage, “the end is nigh” is the nearly unavoidable personal and collective response to times of uncertainty and rapid change. _Pattern Literacy Peak […]

As dispute over islands escalates, Japan and China send fighter jets to scene

The action in the skies over the East China Sea started simply enough. Last week, the Chinese government sent a civilian surveillance plane, a twin propeller aircraft, to fly near the uninhabited islands at the heart of a growing feud between China and Japan. Tokyo, in response, ordered F-15 fighter jets to take a look […]

U.S. 2012 Oil Demand Down 2% vs 2011

The U.S. was plagued by persistently weak demand for refined petroleum products last year, while domestic crude oil production rose at a record rate. New drilling techniques, which unlock crude from shale rock formations, continue to expand and providing a growing source of crude that was not even contemplated only years ago. However, sputtering economic […]

Exxon Mobil and the precautionary principle

A recent poll conducted by the Civil Society Institute (CSI) and the Environmental Working Group found that the vast majority of Americans favor more political leadership when balancing domestic energy production with protecting people and the environment. This poll is interesting on many levels, primarily because of the overwhelming percentages of constituents who want more […]

An EROEI Primer

Vermont Energy Generation Siting Policy “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” – Richard Feynman Numerous factors are considered when evaluating prospective energy production facilities. The outcome of a financial cost-benefit analysis is the key factor for most developers. Dependence on additional resources and environmental consequences […]

Canada’s oil sands cannot stop Peak Oil

The term “Peak Oil” was used for the first time in January 2001. It was then that Colin Campbell wrote his first newsletter for ASPO, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. A month later the “Focus” (Brännpunkt) the Op-Ed column of Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden, published the first debate article on Peak […]

Details emerge of carnage at Algerian natural gas complex; at least one American dead

At least one American died and an unknown number of other foreigners remain unaccounted for Friday as details began to emerge of this week’s assault by Islamist militants on a natural gas production complex in eastern Algeria. The U.S. State Department, which had maintained a stony silence about what it had been told about the […]

Saudi Arabia to grant $100m to Palestinians

Saudi Arabia will give the Palestinian government in the Israeli-occupied West Bank $100m to help alleviate a worsening budget crisis, the Palestinian president’s office has said. “The state’s budget is facing a large deficit as a result of the docking of Palestinian money by the Israeli government as a punitive step after the UN recognition […]

No deal in Iran-IAEA talks

Senior officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, have ended two days of talks with Iranian officials over allegations that Tehran may have carried out tests on triggers for atomic weapons, the Fars news agency reports. Thursday’s report went on to say that the two sides agreed to another round of negotiations scheduled for […]

Do You Want To Scare A Baby Boomer?

If you want to frighten Baby Boomers, just show them the list of statistics in this article.  The United States is headed for a retirement crisis of unprecedented magnitude, and we are woefully unprepared for it.  At this point, more than 10,000 Baby Boomers are reaching the age of 65 every single day, and this will […]

IEA Sees Tighter Oil Market, Boosts Global Demand Forecast

The International Energy Agency raised forecasts for global oil demand this year because of stronger growth expectations for China and said the world oil market is “tighter” than previously estimated. “All of a sudden, the market looks tighter than we thought,” the Paris-based agency said, boosting its 2013 global demand forecast by 240,000 barrels a […]

2 Reports on Oil Sands Paint a Dire Picture

Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline and the heavy Canadian crude oil that it would carry released two reports on Thursday asserting that the environmental impacts of the project are worse than previously estimated, and urged the Obama administration to veto it. One report, from the anti-petroleum group Oil Change International, finds that existing studies […]

Fusion Electricity to Become Part of European Grid by 2050

A road map that indicates how the energy of the stars , or fusion energy, can be added to the European grid by year 2050, was released by the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA). Detailed review of the current status of fusion research, identification of open issues and development of new programmes and research will […]

Ten Reasons Why High Oil Prices are a Problem

A person might think from looking at news reports that our oil problems are gone, but oil prices are still high. Figure 1. US crude oil prices (based on average prices paid by US refiners for all grades of oil based on EIA data) converted to 2012$ using CPI-Urban data from the US Bureau of […]

Experts Fear Collapse of Global Civilisation

Experts on the health of our planet are terrified of the future. They can clearly see the coming collapse of global civilisation from an array of interconnected environmental problems. Poor communities are hit hardest by extreme weather events. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS “We’re all scared,” said Paul Ehrlich, president of the Center for Conservation Biology at […]

Reports say many hostages killed in Algeria siege

A Mauritanian news agency that has been in constant contact with kidnappers holding dozens of Western hostages in Algeria reported on Thursday that 34 of the captives had been killed in air strikes. It was not immediately possible to confirm the report by the ANI news agency, which said 14 kidnappers had also been killed […]

John Michael Greer: The Road Down From Empire

Here in the Appalachians, at least, there’s something about the month of January that encourages sober thoughts.  Maybe it’s the weather, which is pretty reliably gray and cold; maybe it’s the arrival of the bills from the holiday season just ended, or the awkward way that those bills usually arrive about the same time that […]

Peak Oil: Problem? What Problem?

The ongoing saga of Royal Dutch Shell’s efforts to move the crippled drill rig Kulluk were summed up in a very nice piece written last week by Dan Joling at the Huffington Post. Explaining that the efforts are taking place during “the worst of the North Pacific’s fury” is probably all you need to know. […]

Digging for Water, But Striking Oil

The volatile politics of the Middle East have long been dominated by the fluctuating fortunes of a single commodity: oil. But when the oil-blessed region runs out of water, there could be a change in the political landscape, triggering potential conflicts. The world’s future wars, experts predict, will be over water, not oil. U.N. Secretary-General […]

The Really, Really Big Picture

[Many longtime followers of the Crash Course have asked Chris to update his forecasts for Peak Oil in light of the production increases in shale oil and gas over recent years. What started out as a modest effort at clarification morphed into a much more massive 3-report treatise as Chris sifted through mountains of new […]

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