‘Polar vortex’ brought record natural gas demand

The “polar vortex” of early January and the deep freeze not long after resulted in record demand for natural gas, Bentek Energy said Monday. The extreme winter weather in January resulted in seven out of the 10 biggest demand days on record for the U.S., said Bentek, an unit of Platts. January natural-gas demand averaged […]

Canada can’t wait to start pumping. The United States can

MINUTES after America’s State Department declared on January 31st that a proposed cross-border oil-pipeline would have little environmental impact, Canada’s ruling Conservatives posted an online ad bluntly directing Barack Obama to “approve Keystone XL now”. It is not the first time that Canada has dropped the diplomatic niceties when pressing Mr Obama to approve the […]

Hyperinflation – 10 Worst Cases

Inflation is hot property today, hyperinflation is even hotter! We think we are modern, contemporary, smart and ready to deal with anything. We’ve got that seen-it-all-before, been-there-done-it attitude. But, we are not a patch on what some countries have been through in the worst cases of hyperinflation in history. Here’s the top 10 list of […]

Oil and Gas: How Little Is Left

“If we’re doing things like fracking, it just shows how little is left of all this stuff, and how desperate we are to get at it.” — Anonymous Global production of conventional oil is past its peak and is now beginning its decline. A mixed bag of unconventional fuels (shale oil, tar-sands oil, natural-gas-liquids, etc.) […]

John Michael Greer: The Steampunk Future

For those of us who’ve been watching the course of industrial civilization’s decline and fall, the last few weeks have been a bit of a wild ride.  To begin with, as noted in last week’s post, the specter of peak oil has once again risen from the tomb to which the mass media keeps trying […]

Tina Clarke on resourcing your Transition initiative

Tina Clarke is a Transition Trainer and more recently a REconomy trainer, helping to develop new REconomy trainings for Transition groups.  On Tuesday February 11th between 19.00 and 20.30 GMT (14.00 -15.30 EST), she will be presenting, along with Transition Network Funding Manager Nicola Hillary, a free webinar called Getting Ready to Fundraise – resourcing your  […]

U.S. Selling Coal Mining Rights at Undervalued Prices

The U.S. government is violating federal leasing policies when it sells land to certain coal-mining companies, according to a new audit from an official watchdog agency. The practice could be costing taxpayers millions of dollars even as mining operations degrade the environmental integrity of the Powder River Basin in the western U.S. states of Wyoming and […]

Fracking’s Thirst for Water

Some of the nation’s driest, drought-plagued places have quickly become its busiest hot spots of drilling for shale gas and oil, especially in Texas, Colorado and California. It’s a dust-bowl-sized problem likely to become worse, according to a study released Wednesday by the nonprofit sustainability advocacy group firm Ceres. Fracking, the controversial drilling technique, is […]

Natural gas shortage affects Calif. power supply

Californians were urged to voluntarily cut their electricity use Thursday in a rare mid-winter conservation alert, after frigid weather across the U.S. and Canada caused a shortage of natural gas for Southern California power plants. “While the natural gas shortage is only impacting Southern California power plants, statewide electricity and gas conservation will help free […]

Peak Oil: Investment Issues # 3

CAPEX, AGAIN [T]he 2013 WEO has the oil industry’s upstream capex [see this and this] rising by nearly 180 per cent since 2000, but the global oil supply (adjusted for energy content) by only 14 per cent. The most straightforward interpretation of this data is that the economics of oil have become completely dislocated from […]

$5/gal benzene: Here to stay, or recurring but shortlived fad?

If you sell, buy or trade benzene or any of its derivatives, you have heard this assertion before: Five-dollar-a-gallon benzene is a reality. It’s here to stay. It’s not a new one. In fact, you probably first heard in early- to mid-2012, or earlier if you are really plugged in, as they say. Benzene prices […]

Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized

How long can economic growth continue in a finite world? This is the question the 1972 book The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows and others sought to answer. The computer models that the team of researchers produced strongly suggested that the world economy would collapse sometime in the first half of the 21st century. […]

Paving land that feeds us

The News Advertiser’s assertion in an editorial last week that, “There’s no doubt that an airport would be a huge economic benefit …. creating countless jobs” shows breathtaking ignorance of the facts. The complete lack of information from Ottawa is what last Monday’s council motion was all about. No business case has been made by […]

US shale under fire over thirst for water

Water shortages have put the US oil and gas industry on a “collision course” with other users because of the large volumes needed for hydraulic fracturing, a group of leading investors has warned. Almost 40 per cent of the oil and gas wells drilled since 2011 are in areas of “extremely high” water stress, according […]

Victory for the Arctic Ocean: No Drilling Next Summer or Maybe Ever

The wild Arctic Ocean just got a blast of good news. Yesterday Shell Oil bowed to the inevitable and announced it will not be drilling for oil off the coast of Alaska this summer. Now the region’s coastal villages and its whales, dolphins, and polar bears will be spared a repeat of Shell’s disaster-laden attempt […]

Areva and Niger’s uranium fight

When France began mining uranium ore in the desert of northern Niger in the early 1970s, Arlit was a cluster of miners’ huts stranded between the sun-blasted rocks of the Air mountains and the sands of the Sahara. The 1973 OPEC oil embargo changed that. France embraced nuclear power to free itself from reliance on […]

Some Lessons From Early Successes of the Next Wave

As we see increasing evidence of a “next wave” of cleantech investing and entrepreneurship, we’re starting to see some early wins emerge. What lessons can we learn from the experiences of recent demonstrated successes like Nest, SolarCity, rumored upcoming IPOs (we see you, Opower), and earlier examples like Tesla? People will draw their own conclusions, […]

Shale Gas Revolution Worldwide, Only New York Resists

The Shale Gas Revolution has prevailed everywhere but New York and what’s happening in Poland and the UK will lead it to prevail there as well.  Last night I participated in a debate with some folks at Cornell, including my friend Walter Hang, who noted during his summary remarks the shale gas revolution had taken […]

Syria misses chemical weapons handover deadline

Syria on Wednesday missed a deadline to hand over all the toxic materials it declared to the world’s chemical weapons watchdog, putting the program several weeks behind schedule and jeopardizing a final June 30 deadline. At the same time, opposition activists say the Syrian air force is attacking the country’s biggest city, Aleppo, with barrel […]

Future food; We can grow enough, but how will we distribute it?

When we talk about the future of food, we usually start with world population growth. Estimates say we’ll pass the 8 billion-people mark around the spring of 2024. The worry for decades has been if we will be able to feed all those hungry mouths. The number of hungry mouths may not be the problem. […]

The Peak Oil Crisis: The Search for Cheap, Clean Energy

There are now two new potential sources of energy which seem to be too good to be true. This is why most, upon hearing what they might offer, reject the notion that they can possibly be true. Water for fuel? Nonsense! Electricity for a tenth of the current price? Absurd! An end to carbon emissions […]

Fukushima wash-up to hit US coast this year

Seaborne radiation from Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant will wash up on the West Coast of the US this year. That’s raising concerns among some Americans including the residents of the San Francisco Bay Area city of Fairfax, California, which passed a resolution on December 6 calling for more testing of coastal seafood. At the […]

Japanese government seeks approval to dump Fukushima groundwater into sea

The government on Monday sought approval of a nationwide fisheries federation to dump groundwater at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex into the sea on condition that the water’s contamination level is far below the legal limit. During talks with the head of the National Federation of Fisheries Co-operative Associations, industry ministry officials explained that […]

The US Economy Is Growing Much Slower Than You Think

Deceptive and Fraudulent … “Products are paid for with products,” said French economist and free-trade proponent Jean-Baptiste Say. He meant that if you want to get something, you better have something you can trade for it. What would Say make of the latest US GDP report? Last week brought two important pieces of news: one […]

Swarms of Earthquakes Shake Up Shale Gas Fields

House damage in central Oklahoma from the magnitude 5.6 earthquake in 2011.Research conducted by U.S. Geological Survey geophysicists suggests it was induced by injection into deep disposal wells in the Wilzetta North field. Photo Credit: Brian Sherrod, USGS. The locals call it “incoming,” and some compare the violence of the tremors to living in a war […]

Drop Washington’s Counterproductive Oil and Natural Gas Export Ban

For years people have been told to expect a dismal energy future. But because of rapid free market innovation, Americans now can look forward to a future of energy abundance. The U.S. could even become a leading exporter—if Washington gets out of the way. Successive presidents and Congresses imposed controls, approved subsidies, created bureaucracies, and […]

U.S. Crude Oil Exports, Really? – A Look at the UK

Last week the U.S. Senate’s Energy Committee held the first hearing in decades on the question of whether exporting US crude oil, prohibited by law since the 1970s, should be allowed again.  Attendees heard proponents say that allowing crude exports would hold prices down with opponents claiming the opposite case. To be clear, these would […]

Toward a Finite-Planet Journalism

The Ozark National Scenic Riverways Park in southeastern Missouri was created in 1964 as the first National Park unit to protect a wild and scenic river system. Enclosing 184 miles of river and in many places scarcely wider than the banks of the rivers it protects, the park gets more than a million visitors in the summer, […]

NYMEX No Future For Crude Oil Futures

According to Leah McGrath Goodman’s well-researched book “The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World’s Oil Market”, the start of Nymex oil trading was in major part due to traders who stumbled upon oil futures after screwing up Maine potato futures. Their trading “industry” or gambling party had been built on predicting the Maine potato harvest, […]

‘Biogasoline’ from plant waste

Gasoline-like fuels can be made from cellulosic materials such as farm and forestry waste using a new process invented by chemists at the University of California, Davis. The process could open up new markets for plant-based fuels, beyond existing diesel substitutes. “What’s exciting is that there are lots of processes to make linear hydrocarbons, but […]

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