Iraq’s Maliki Threatens to Cut Funds If Kurds Pipe Oil to Turkey

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki threatened on Sunday to cut Kurdistan’s share of the federal budget if the autonomous region exports oil to Turkey via a new pipeline without central government consent. The Kurdistan Regional Government said last week that crude had begun to flow to Turkey and exports were expected to start at the […]

Record Wind Power Levels Trigger Energy Price Fall Across Europe

Electricity prices across Europe dropped last month as mild temperatures, strong winds and stormy weather produced wind power records in Germany, France and the UK, according to data released by Platts. The Platts Continental Power Index (CONTI) fell 0.4% in December 2013 to €46.80 per Megawatt hour (/MWh) compared to the November 2013 rate of […]

France to invest in Britain’s shale gas

Total (TOTF.PA) is set to become the first major oil company to invest in Britain’s nascent shale gas industry, boosting the industry’s profile in a country seen as one of Europe’s strongest prospects for unconventional oil and gas development. The French group is set to commit 30 million pounds ($50 million) to drilling for shale […]

Albert Bates: Youre Inn at The Farm

Hi Y’all, Albert Bates here. For most of my life I have been working on ideas that could make the world a little better — more fair, more free, more ecologically and economically sustainable, and more fun. In 1972, straight out of law school, I joined The Farm, an experimental utopian hippy community in Summertown, […]

Coal Makes a 2014 Comeback

While environmental regulations and cheap natural gas have worked together to kill off coal in the United States, coal is not dead yet. The rapidly unfolding shale gas revolution brought prices down so significantly in recent years that natural gas began to capture market share from coal in a meaningful way. In particular, coal’s share dropped from […]

3 Energy Trends That Won’t Change in 2014

Many pundits try predicting future changes. I prefer Jeff Bezos’ approach: He once claimed he had no idea what would change in the future, but he was pretty confident about what wouldn’t change. Things like customers wanting great prices and selection, a hassle-free online shopping experience, and helpful customer service. So, following Bezos’ example, here […]

So much for “peak oil”

The Romans named the first month of the year after the double-headed god Janus, the symbol of thresholds and transitions. He reminds us how life often involves choices between opposites. Janus stands at January’s doorway looking at both 2013 and the New Year. One Janus-like debate in the energy sector revolves around the world’s oil […]

Is Fracking Delaying the Transformation to Alternative Energy?

  Internal combustion engines (ICEs), a Shell study predicted last year, will have been replaced completely by electric, hydrogen powered motors by 2070. The effects would be far-reaching not only for the petroleum and liquid gas industries, but also for technology metals, which will play their role in different ways in each of the scenarios: […]

BP’s appeal to stop ‘fictitious’ U.S. oil spill claims fails

One of BP’s attempts to curb payouts for what it says are “fictitious” and “absurd” claims related to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill has failed after a legal appeal was rejected by a U.S. court. BP had argued in its appeal that the administration of a 2012 settlement agreement was faulty because it […]

How Much Energy is Needed for the Sochi Winter Olympics?

As we move into the second week of 2014, most of us start to veer away from our New Year’s resolutions.  (Who enjoys counting calories, anyway?)   Instead, we shift our focus toward what’s really important: the Winter Olympics!  Hosting this year’s Games is Sochi, Russia, and in order to arrange the best Olympic Games we’ve […]

Gaia: you ain’t seen nothing yet

The magnificent lady who gathers up the divine powers of heaven and earth and rivals great An, is mightiest among the great gods. She makes their verdicts final (from the electronic text corpus of Sumerian Literature) A review of the book by Tim Lenton and Andrew Watson “Revolutions that made the earth” (Oxford 2011) The […]

The Energy Oath: In Production and Use Do Good or No Harm

“The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future — must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.”  Hippocrates. He said this in Of the Epidemics written in 400 B.C.E as opposed […]

Oil tanker trade growth is fastest in a decade

Oil tanker trade is growing at its fastest rate in a decade as the boom in US production forces exporters that in the past supplied the American market to seek new customers further afield. The number of oil tonne-miles – a proxy for the global oil trade that captures both the volume traded and the […]

A Future for the Rest of Us

A Guest Post by Bill Hays Editor’s Note: Part 11 of this series discussed the concept of peak oil and our transportation system’s dependency on cheap and abundant energy. Part 2 explored some of the non-oil constraints on the future transport system of the US. Here Part 3 Outlines some of the options we have […]

The Schizophrenic Society

My first book, “Energy & Finance” is being published at the end of February and I am now researching a second one. This is the draft introduction to the book I am thinking of writing about society’s inability to act on the systemic threats that it faces. Proposed improvements and comments would be much appreciated. […]

The 4 Big Dangers of Fracking

By now you’ve likely heard that the U.S. is expected to overtake Russia this year as the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas. The surge in production comes from a drilling boom enabled by using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, along with, in many places, horizontal drilling. These technologies have made previously inaccessible pockets of […]

Digging deeper into oil and gas industry workplace fatalities

A few days before the New Year rang in, National Public Radio came out with an interesting report on how workplace deaths have increased with the hiring spree in the oil patch to keep up with the boom in unconventional oil and gas drilling. In fact, right in the third paragraph, we see that 138 […]

Ex-Director Of DOE Lab Found Dead

A former National Energy Technology Laboratory director who’d been indicted by a grand jury has been found dead in Pennsylvania. The Allegheny County medical examiner’s office says Pittsburgh resident Anthony Cugini (koo-GHEE’-nee) was found Wednesday at the Wingfield Pines Conservation Area, just outside his hometown. A determination of the cause of death is pending. Police […]

American Chemical Society launches Sustainable Food toolkit

As the world’s population swells beyond 10 billion people later this century, what can we do to sustain the farmland, energy and water supplies needed to keep everyone fed? That’s the challenging question that Sustainable Food, a web-based toolkit, addresses with an anchor video and dozens of resources. The toolkit is a project of the […]

Tepco “Explains” Plumes Of Smoke Above Exploded Fukushima Reactor 3

In the past two weeks there was significant speculation that the Fukushima catastrophe was once again rapidly escalating after plumes of mysterious smoke were detected above the destroyed Reactor 3 – the one with a mixed MOX and uranium fuel core. RT described it as follows: Fresh plumes of most probably radioactive steam have been […]

If You Are Waiting For An “Economic Collapse”, Just Look At What Is Happening To Europe

If you are anxiously awaiting the arrival of the “economic collapse”, just open up your eyes and look at what is happening in Europe.  The entire continent is a giant economic mess right now.  Unemployment and poverty levels are setting record highs, car sales are setting record lows, and there is an ocean of bad […]

Another Iraq War?

Many Americans are surprised to see Fallujah back on the front pages of newspapers. How did things get so bad that the Iraqi government was compelled to call for American support in its battle against an al-Qaeda affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria? This crescendo of violence is the culmination of two well-established […]

Michael Klare: Peak Oil Is Dead. Long Live Peak Oil!

The eulogies for peak oil came too soon. Among the big energy stories of 2013, “peak oil”—the once-popular notion that worldwide oil production would soon reach a maximum level and begin an irreversible decline—was thoroughly discredited. The explosive development of shale oil and other unconventional fuels in the United States helped put it in its […]

Heinberg: Shale gas, peak oil and our future

Selma Franssen: Considering the shale gas and oil reserves in Europe, is there any sense in fracking here, all other objections aside? Richard Heinberg: Until test wells are drilled, it’s very difficult to know what the actual shale gas and oil production potential is for Europe. All sorts of numbers have been cited, but they […]

Peak Oil: Clear As Mud

The U.S. will surpass Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer by 2015, and be close to energy self-sufficiency in the next two decades, amid booming output from shale formations, the IEA said. (links in original) [1]  The International Energy Agency has sounded the alarm about a potential oil supply crunch…. (links […]

Saudis implementing massive public transit expansion

Properties and lands expropriated for the King Abdulaziz Public Transport Project (metro and bus system) have ranged between 1.8 to 2 million square meters. On the other hand, the Higher Commission for the Development of Riyadh (HCDR) has expropriated lands in 140 locations of which 80 percent of the lands lying on the city’s outskirts […]

Violence not hitting Iraq oil for now, but raises concern

Iraq’s oil industry and its foreign investors see no cause to panic after al Qaeda militants seized major towns last week – troubled Anbar province, they note, could hardly be further from the main oilfields. Yet the violence, in part a spillover from Syria’s civil war into Iraq’s western desert, has brought new unease about […]

John Michael Greer: 2030 is the New 2012

  Last week’s discussion of failed predictions in the peak oil movement inevitably touched on the latest round of claims that the world as we know it is going to come to a full stop sometime very soon. That was inevitable partly because these claims account for a fairly large fraction of the predictions made […]

Peak Oil as an Epochalist Illusion

“Peak oil theory, as you probably know, starts with the obvious observation that oil is a finite resource. The process which produces oil takes place over geological time scales and so once we have used up what?s in the ground now, it is effectively gone. The peak comes when the rate of extraction can no […]

Another Canadian Oil Train Derails, Burns After Brakes Activated

A Canadian National Railway train carrying crude oil and propane derailed and caught fire in New Brunswick on Tuesday night after the emergency brakes were activated, federal safety officials said on Wednesday. The accident, the latest in a string of derailments that have put the surging crude-by-rail business under scrutiny, involved 17 cars on the […]

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