Oil Flows Beneath the Battlefield

At seven o’clock in the morning on Mar. 1, Kurdish militias took over the only operational oil refinery in Syria, located about 800 kilometres northwest of Damascus. “They told us to go home, and to wait for two days until everything was settled,” recalled Mahmud Hassan, one of 3,000 workers at the Rumelan refinery. According […]

John Michael Greer: The Religion of Progress

To suggest that faith in progress has become the most widely accepted civil religion of the modern industrial world, as I’ve done in these essays, is to say something at once subtler and more specific than a first glance might suggest. It’s important to keep in mind, as I pointed out in last week’s post, […]

How Obama’s New Budget Targets Oil And Gas

Granted, President Obama’s newly submitted budget is likely dead-on-arrival in Washington, but it’s still well worth taking a look at it to get a sense of what he would do to the energy industry if he were king instead of just president. The headline proposal is the president’s idea for an Energy Security Trust, “funded […]

Seven Years More Data in the Hubbert Model

On Monday, I objected to some statements by Dennis Meadows that oil production had clearly peaked in the past and would now decline by half within twenty years.  He dismissed various possibilities for higher oil production from low grade sources as irrelevant.  To make my objections, I pointed out by looking at average growth rates, […]

Fracking ‘Not Significant’ in Causing Earth Tremors

New research has found that hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is “not significant” in causing earth tremors. Released Wednesday by the UK’s Durham University, the results of a study of hundreds of thousands of fracking operations showed that the process only caused earth tremors that could be felt on the surface in three cases. The research, titled […]

Discovery Means New Potential for Hydrogen from Plants

Monumental breakthroughs in renewable energy research are happening at Virginia Tech.  Scientist Y.H. Percival Zhang and his team have discovered a way to cheaply produce mass quantities of hydrogen using only xylose, a simple sugar abundant in plants.  The process has potential to mass produce hydrogen fuel in an economical and environmentally friendly for the […]

Peak Oil Flip-Flop

There’s a new twist in the “peak oil” debate. Is it good news for the climate? Peak Oil Question Remains, Debate Continues Ever since M. King Hubbert advanced the theory of peak oil in 1956, experts and non-experts alike have been debating about timing and relevance. (See here, here, here and here.) Hubbert’s argument seems like a […]

Iran’s Ahmadinejad Orders Launch of Five Nuclear Reactors

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said his country has “gone nuclear” and ordered officials to “speedily” launch five more reactors. Ahmadinejad was speaking at a ceremony to mark Nuclear Technology Day, as well as launch two uranium mines and a yellow cake production plant in the city of Yazd. The controversial president once again made […]

Ethanol Lobby Agitates for E15 Mandate

History of U.S. Ethanol Policy In 1978 the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a gasohol waiver that set the maximum legal limit of ethanol in motor gasoline at 10 percent denatured anhydrous ethanol. 27 years later, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 created a Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) requiring 7.5 billion gallons of […]

Community Grounded In Grief In The Age Of Limits

Grief reveals the undeniable reality of our bond with the world…It is grief that moves us in the direction of contact, towards the helping hands and embrace of others…without it we would not know the heartening quality of compassion, could not experience the full breadth of love, the surprise of joy, nor celebrate the sheer […]

EIA Trims World Oil Use Growth Forecast for 2013, 2014

World oil demand will rise in 2013 and 2014, but moderate recovery in economic growth will keep the gains lower than projected a month earlier, U.S. government forecasters said Tuesday. In 2013, rising consumption in China and in other developing nations is expected to offset weakness in European economies, the Energy Information Administration said. World […]

Russia Putin Warns Korean Crisis Could Be Worse Than Chernobyl

Russian President Vladimir Putin appealed on Monday for calm on the Korean Peninsula, warning that the escalation of tension in the region could lead to a nuclear disaster far worse than the Chernobyl incident. “We are concerned about the escalation on the Korean Peninsula because we are neighbors and because if, God forbid, anything should […]

To Stem Fall in Oil Output, Alaska Seeks to Slash Industry Taxes

President Obama’s budget proposal this week is likely to seek an end to federal tax breaks for oil and gas companies, attempting to revive a bid that died in Congress last year. Meanwhile, with much more rigor, Alaska is heading in the opposite direction. Alaska’s State House is working on a bill already passed by […]

Former U.S. Nuclear Chief: American Nuclear Plants Should Be Phased Out — “Can’t Guarantee Against Accident Causing Widespread Land Contamination”

Energy intelligence reports: Former Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chairman Gregory Jaczko says that the current fleet of operating plants in the US should be phased out because regulators can’t guarantee against an accident causing widespread land contamination. In two key decisions last week Jaczko said the agency “damaged significantly” its international reputation for upholding safety […]

China’s Infinite-Growth Haze

A few weeks ago, air quality at the U.S. embassy in Beijing registered 755 on a scale to 500. A thick, choking haze enveloped the entire city. You couldn’t see from one high-rise office tower to the next; flights were cancelled, some highways were closed, schoolchildren were kept indoors, hospital admissions soared. China’s air quality […]

Should the last few years have updated your idea of peak oil?

Nate Hagens draws my attention to this recent interview with Dennis Meadows, lead author of the famous Limits to Growth series of books.  Meadows is very pessimistic.  I was particularly interested in his views on oil production and peak oil, in which he states positively that peak oil is in the past (which is very arguable […]

Food: The Weak Link

The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity. Over the last decade, world grain reserves have fallen by one third. World food prices have more than doubled, triggering a worldwide land rush and ushering in a new geopolitics of food. Food is the new oil. Land is the […]

The Looming Threat of Water Scarcity

Some 1.2 billion people—almost a fifth of the world—live in areas of physical water scarcity, while another 1.6 billion face what can be called economic water shortage. The situation is only expected to worsen as population growth, climate change, investment and management shortfalls, and inefficient use of existing resources restrict the amount of water available […]

Tens Dead, Hundreds Injured As 6.1 Earthquake Hits Near Iran’s Nuclear Power Plant

  A few hours ago, a major 6.1 magnitude quake struck in Iran once again, some 100 km away from Bushehr – location of Iran’s only nuclear power plant. According to subsequent reports, at least 30 people have been killed and nearly 600 injured, although at least for now the official version is that the […]

25 Things That You Should Do To Get Prepared For The Coming Economic Collapse

Do you think that you know how to prepare for the collapse of the economy?  If so, are you putting that knowledge into action?  In America today, people are more concerned about the possibility of an economic collapse than ever before.  It has been estimated that there are now three million preppers in the United […]

The global food crisis

With the many issues facing the world today, we often forget to pay attention to the long lingering problems, which may be the most critical of all. The growing world population and relatively stagnant growth in food production is predicted to threaten a long-term global food crisis that could have disastrous consequences. We hear a […]

Peak Oil Denial: Sticking To The Script

The latest entry straight from the playbook on peak oil denial—that seemingly never-ending attempt to ignore facts, mis-/under-inform readers, or create ever-rising levels of non-credible optimism—is a nearly 6800 word ode to the technology wizards and ingenuity gods of our fossil fuel industry, courtesy of the Manhattan Institute. (I’ve commented on that organization’s efforts before: […]

US, Japan Now Global Allies in Money Printing

U.S. markets, particularly the riskiest areas of investment, are likely to benefit at least near term from the latest entrant to the central bank money-printing arena. Following the lead of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan last week announced an even more ambitious project to use created funds to buy assets in the hopes […]

Oil CEO Admits Quart by Quart Oil Spills Are Happening Continually, and On a Daily Basis Into Our Precious Water Supplies

In our extended coverage with this enigmatic and lifelong oilman and “downhole” expert, we explore the topic of quart by quart oil spills into the environment. The fossil fuel CEO, who in his own words said he wanted to “take the opportunity to clear his conscience of some things that have been weighing on his […]

Oil-Eating Bacteria Mitigated Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Oil-eating bacteria that are abundant in the Gulf of Mexico may have prevented the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill from being more catastrophic, according to new research discussed Monday. According to some estimates, the spill pumped nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the course of nearly three months, but within […]

Should the U.S. Allow Increased Domestic Crude Oil Exports?

U.S. domestic crude oil production was in decline following the mid 1980’s.  Recent drilling technology innovations and new State and Private Lands reserve development have reversed this trend since 2008.  Rapidly growing new domestic crude oil supply could possibly exceed some regional (Refining) markets’ demand similar to what has been recently experienced with the rapid […]

GE Increases Presence in Oil and Natural Gas with Acquisition

General Electric is moving to increase its presence in the oil and natural gas market with the purchase of Lufkin Industries. Lufkin makes oil field pumps and are the pumps everyone sees moving back in forth on top of oil wells. GE has been making huge moves in recent years in the oil and natural […]

Art of the Anthropocene: The Bakken

The Bakken formation in North Dakota and Montana has helped spark a “peak oil is dead” meme in the media and elsewhere. There are reasons to believe that this latest fad is as overblown as the peak oil frenzy was in the mid-2000s. But one thing is clear: The Bakken is a big producer of oil. […]

Michael Lynch: When Peak Oil Advocates Disappeared

Michael Lynch is the president and director of global petroleum service at Strategic Energy & Economic Research. The past couple of years have seen an amazing transformation of the argument that oil and gas production will soon peak with catastrophic consequences, which has given way to the insistence that we don’t really need fossil fuels. […]

Why Iran isn’t the Soviet Union

Despite the rhetoric of the Obama administration and tougher sanctions, hard realities suggest a likely American policy of not attacking Iran but seeking to contain it. For Iran, the benefits of nuclear weapons are significant: becoming the ninth member of the world’s exclusive nuclear club, spurring nationalist ardor at home, potentially dominating the Middle East, […]

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