A New Peak Oil Ahead?

There’s a fascinating piece in the latest Economist arguing that the world’s “supermajor” oil companies—BP, ConocoPhillips, Exxon, Total, Shell and Chevron—are facing serious challenges in the near term. Two trends undergird these surprising prediction: First, supermajors have been pushed out of directly controlling oil reserves by various national oil companies (NOCs) like Brazil’s Petrobras and Saudi Aramco, […]

Iran’s Rouhani misquoted in remarks on Israel

Two days before his inauguration as Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani said on Friday that Israeli occupation of Palestinian land had inflicted a “wound” on the Muslim world, according to a segment of his remarks broadcast on Iran’s state-run Press TV. An earlier report by Iran’s student news agency ISNA had quoted Rouhani as saying: […]

Our daily conveniences are somebody else’s suffering

Jain nuns in India reject electricity for ethical reasons. Photo by author. I grope my way up the stairs in near-complete darkness, unaccustomed to the uneven concrete floors and unexpected corners of the building I first entered only a few hours earlier, following a seven-hour bus ride from Jaipur, India. My only guide through the […]

Peak Oil and the New Carbon Boom

This essay is adapted from the afterword to the paperback edition of Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, out next month from Verso Books. We’ll have more on energy and the environment later this week in anticipation of our Summer 2013 issue, out on Monday, with a special section on environmentalism. Click here to subscribe. In the past […]

The future of Oil: Yesterday’s fuel

The world’s thirst for oil could be nearing a peak. That is bad news for producers, excellent for everyone else THE dawn of the oil age was fairly recent. Although the stuff was used to waterproof boats in the Middle East 6,000 years ago, extracting it in earnest began only in 1859 after an oil […]

Stim goes to the Tar Sands

This Week: 1. Snoden’s fears come true 2. Istanbul Rising 3. Obama can kill you 4. Brazil’s Massive insurrection 5. Made You Die 6. Stim goes to the Tar Sands Download SD • Translate • Torrent JOIN THE TACONSPIRACY!

Faster-Than-Expected Population Growth in Many Feed the Future Countries

By Kathleen Mogelgaard  // Thursday, August 1, 2013 Cambodia to grow by nearly one-third by 2050; Kenya to more than double; Mali to swell to three times its current size. These were the population projections available when Feed the Future, President Obama’s global hunger and food security initiative, was beginning implementation in 19 focus countries […]

Iran sanctions bill on oil passed by US House

US lawmakers have approved a sweeping bill aimed at slashing Iran’s oil exports even further over its disputed nuclear programme. The bill adopted by the lower house of Congress penalises countries that buy Iranian oil and further limits Iran’s access to overseas bank accounts. The Senate must also approve the bill before it becomes law. […]

Big Oil struggles with costs as results fall flat

Some of the western world’s top oil companies this week abandoned output targets, missed profit forecasts and promised a tight rein on spending after turning in disappointing quarterly results. Thursday’s slew of industry results saw Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L) and Exxon Mobil (XOM.N) disappoint market analysts. The pair are two of the industry’s top three […]

Global Water Shortages Grow Worse But Nations Have Few Answers

As we have been hearing, global water shortages are poised to exacerbate regional conflict and hobble economic growth. Yet the problem is growing worse, and is threatening to deal devastating blows to health, according to top water officials from the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) who spoke before a […]

Russia’s Oil Output Rises to Near Most Since Soviet Era

Russia, the world’s biggest oil producer, increased crude and condensate production by 1 percent in July from a year earlier to 10.43 million barrels a day, near a post-Soviet record. Daily output fell 0.7 percent from June, when it set the record, according to preliminary data sent by e-mail today from the Energy Ministry’s CDU-TEK […]

Why Oil Could Move Higher… Much Higher

Commodities could rise even as global demand sags. The conventional wisdom of the moment is that a weakening global economy will push the cost of commodities such as oil down as demand stagnates. This makes perfect sense in terms of physical supply and demand, but this ignores the consequences of financial demand and capital flows. I wrote this […]

Peak Oil: Preparations, Anyone?

An observation worth noting … and pondering, from Robert Hirsch: The peak oil story is definitely a bad news story. There’s just no way to sugar-coat it, other than maybe to do what I’ve done on occasion and that is to say that by 2050 we’ll have it right and we will have come through […]

What is “Business as Usual” in terms of now to 2030 ? 2050 ?

  A small blog listed Nextbigfuture among three optimistic future related blogs (Singularity Hub and KurzweilAI are the two others). He lists six blogs that are pessimistic about the future. One of the pessimistic blogs is collapse of industrial civilization which has a sample article that proposes that a collapse will be well underway by […]

Peak shale oil? What peak?

  A graphic contributed by Jean Laherrere indicating that shale oil production in North Dakota may soon peak and start declining. This figure, made by Jean Laherrere, deals with oil production from the “Bakken Shale,” a geological formation existing in large part in North Dakota. Shales may contain oil deposits, in most cases in the […]

Time to take over Daiichi?

It has been almost 2½ years since the disaster at Fukushima No. 1 (Fukushima Daiichi) nuclear plant commenced, but the precarious condition of the nuclear plant remains a constant fixture in the news. A sentence that has been reappearing in stories in recent months has been some variation of “the incident has brought the Fukushima […]

Casualties of the war on coal

A war on coal is underway, instigated by a few opposition groups with powerful voices. The World Bank’s announcement to oppose the financing of coal plants overseas is only the latest development in the ongoing debate, which recently found its way onto the editorial page of The Washington Times. Unfortunately, coal opponents regularly overlook the […]

Green Light for U.K. Biomass Plant

The U.K. government has granted permission for the construction of a 100-megawatt (MW) biomass power station at Blyth Harbour, in Northumberland. Permission was granted by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to Renewable Energy Systems Limited (RES) (Kings Langley, England) for the planned North Blyth Biomass Power Station, located at Battleship Wharf in […]

Depletion of Nigeria’s reserves amid unexploited, undiscovered crude oil resources

NIGERIA’S oil and gas industry operates hundreds of producing wells, gas plants, network of thousands of kilometres of pipelines criss-crossing the entire oil bearing zone to the flow stations and terminals. Activities in the country’s oil and gas industry are much concentrated in the Niger Delta. The area is Africa’s largest delta and the third […]

Count Yourself Among The Poor!

Go ahead, be a fool, tell yourself that you are still part of that once proud American “middle-class,” then dare look in the mirror and see yourself as nothing but a zombie. Or, rather, the new identifiable species in the US: the Amerizombie, a reanimated economic corpse, undead but politically clueless to the new global […]

The Oil Drum Bites the Bag

It’s been a while since I last checked the PO situation, but I did a bit of browsing recently, and it seems that PO has, well, gone down the toilet. I first started following peak oil in August 2004, and when I first heard the hype, I immediately thought “here we go, this is Y2K […]

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