At the Crucial Nexus of Water and Energy

Global institutions are still in the learning phase when it comes to successfully managing water and energy in an integrated manner as part of the quest for sustainable development. According to World Bank official Daryl Fields, understanding the water-energy nexus is critical for addressing growth and human development, urbanisation and climate change, but many policy-makers […]

The emerging power of microgrids

Over many decades, the centralized power grid — a one-way flow of electricity, generated by large, remote power plants and distributed over miles of transmission lines to homes and businesses — succeeded in delivering electricity across continents to billions. But in recent years the system’s shortcomings have become increasingly evident. The conventional grid is largely […]

Ukrainians told to save natural gas to survive winter

The head of Naftogaz of Ukraine, Andrei Kobolev, urged the Ukrainian citizens to save gas, as the country may have problems with the fuel in winter. According to Koboleva, the failed negotiations with Russia could lead to the shortage of six billion cubic meters of natural gas. To avoid the disaster, the population should save […]

Oil Reserves Estimate in the Middle East by Bahrain Oil and Gas Minister

Peak-Oil Theory: Oil Reserves Estimate in the Middle East by Bahrain Oil and Gas Minister

Shale gas could meet 10 percent of EU demand

Shale could eventually meet about 10 percent of the energy demand among European nations, European Energy Commissioner Gunther Oettinger said. Oettinger said companies with reservations about hydrualic fracturing, the controversial drilling practice dubbed fracking, should keep all options on the table. “I estimate that Europe has the potential to secure about a tenth of our […]

Debt: Eight Reasons This Time is Different

In today’s world, we have a huge amount of debt outstanding. Academic researchers Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogart have become famous for their book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly and their earlier paper This Time is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises. Their point, of course, is that […]

Michael Lynch: The Urban Legend Of Inadequate Discoveries

In my first piece on peak oil, I included a graph showing discoveries and production, and some commented that this seemed to invalidate my arguments since discoveries have not been replacing production for decades. This is another example of the ignorance of many who comment on the peak oil issue, and I will clarify. The […]

Kunstler: Never has a society appeared so childishly decadent

W ith lakes, swimming holes, rivers, and pools beckoning, I went to a sporting goods chain store at the mall — where else? — seeking a new bathing suit (pardon the quaint locution). The store was curiously named Dick’s. All they had were clown trunks. By this I mean a garment designed to hang somewhere […]

Greenpeace Activists Block Chevron Shale Site in Romania

Greenpeace activists chained themselves to the gates of a Chevron shale gas exploration well in eastern Romania on Monday, blocking access to the site and urging the leftist government to ban fracking. Romania could potentially hold 51 trillion cubic feet of shale gas, which would cover domestic demand for more than a century, the U.S. […]

The Energy Cost of Local Food

In The Energy Cost of Food I showed how incredibly energy intensive the US food system is. There’s a common assumption among those in the local food movement that one benefit of relocalizing food systems is a reduced demand for energy. As someone who’s been doing energy input-output audits of small farms for years I’ve come to believe that the realities of […]

Are We Close to Peak Coal in China?

Last year, renewable energy made up nearly 70 percent of new electric generation capacity additions in China. That figure would be more impressive if coal wasn’t the reigning supreme leader of China’s energy landscape. It currently accounts for about 65 percent of the country’s energy mix. But coal’s tight grip on the country may start […]

Don’t Fear ‘Fracking,’ Fear The Horrid Illusion That Revived Fracking

In 1980 Julian Simon famously bet modern Malthusian Paul Ehrlich $10,000 that five commodity metals chosen by Ehrlich (he selected copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten) would decline in price by 1990. Simon’s point was that price signals tell producers where their production is needed, so the high prices for the five would serve as […]

North Dakota and Texas Now Provide Nearly Half of U.S. Crude Oil Production

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Petroleum Supply Monthly U.S. crude production in April 2014 was 8.4 million barrels per day (bbl/d), with two states, Texas and North Dakota, accounting for nearly half of this total. Texas production topped 3.0 million bbl/d for the first time since the late 1970s, more than doubling production in the […]

Power Struggles in Middle East Exploit Islam’s Ancient Sectarian Rift

Black and yellow concrete barricades block the roads entering this wealthy Sunni enclave, where foreign-born Sunni soldiers in armored personnel carriers guard the mansions of the ruling family and the business elite. Beyond the enclave are impoverished villages of Shiites, about 70 percent of Bahrain’s more than 650,000 citizens, where the police skirmish nightly with […]

Plan needed for human overload

  PSYCHOLOGISTS tell us that we spend 97 per cent of our time thinking about ourselves but on Friday, let’s spare a thought for the world as it is World Population Day. This day, to raise awareness of global population issues, was established by the UN in 1989 and has been celebrated across the world […]

Energy Descent Pathways. Evaluating Potential Responses to Peak Oil

This dissertation reviews the literature on the subject of ‘peak oil’, the hypothesized peaking in world oil production. For Western societies dependent on supplies of cheap oil and gas, a rapid and unplanned for discontinuity in supply could be disastrous, affecting everything from food distribution to transportation. Some writers call for a ‘wartime mobilisation’ engagement […]

Don’t Worry, Monsanto Has Plans to Feed the World

The 4,400 acres Dustin Spears farms with his father-in-law stretch for 50 miles across northern Illinois in an archipelago of disconnected, mostly rented plots. Even in the best of circumstances, it’s a race to get the corn in the ground in time to take advantage of the full growing season. When spring is unusually cold and […]

CEO Of One Of The World’s Largest Energy Majors “Sees No Reason For Petrodollar”

The USA is fast running out of friends to support its ‘exorbitant privelege’. Having alienated the Germans over NSA-eavesdropping, ‘boomerang’d the Russians into de-dollarization, tariffed and quantitatively eased China into diversification, and finally ‘punished’ France into discussing the dollar’s demise; it appears no lessor person than the CEO of Total (the world’s 13th biggest oil […]

Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes on Peak Oil

20 minute talk from Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett’s 2005 Energy Conference. Dr. Deffeyes is an author and Princeton University professor emeritus. He joined the Shell research lab when M. King Hubbert had recently issued his controversial predictions that U.S. oil production would peak during the ’70s. After reworking Hubbert’s numbers, Dr. Deffeyes sought other employment. […]

Electricity, gas shortage a real threat

New England’s electricity supply is in peril. As reported today in our page-one story, the region’s residents are increasingly relying on relatively inexpensive natural gas to heat their homes and turn on their lights. According to the regional electricity transmission organization ISO-New England, natural gas power plants alone produced 46 percent of the region’s power […]

China, Korea agree to direct trade in national currencies

China designated a clearing bank in Seoul for yuan transactions in South Korea on Friday, coinciding with a visit by President Xi Jinping, as Beijing promotes greater use of its currency overseas, AFP reports. China’s central bank has authorised the Bank of Communications, the country’s fifth largest lender, to undertake yuan clearing business in the […]

Aggressive Tactic on the Fracking Front

A Pennsylvania gas company offers residents cash to buy protection from any claims of harm. For the last eight years, Pennsylvania has been riding the natural gas boom, with companies drilling and fracking thousands of wells across the state. And in a little corner of Washington County, some 20 miles outside of Pittsburgh, EQT Corporation […]

Oil rich, gas poor: Iraq’s excruciating gas lines

The lines have become a part of daily life in Erbil, a relatively peaceful and prosperous city in the autonomous Kurdish region of Northern Iraq. Over the years, it’s mostly managed to avoid the problems that have plagued the rest of the country. But that’s no longer the case. In recent weeks, the war between […]

The lessons learned in the ashes of Lac-Megantic, one year on

When the buzz of bulldozers and construction workers quiets for the evening, there’s an uneasy calm in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. The heart of town is still shut down as half burnt buildings stand eerily next to empty plots of land. One year later, the small Canadian town, 10 miles from the U.S. border, is fighting to […]

USA Biggest Oil Producer After Overtaking Saudi Arabia

The U.S. will remain the world’s biggest oil producer this year after overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia as extraction of energy from shale rock spurs the nation’s economic recovery, Bank of America Corp. said. U.S. production of crude oil, along with liquids separated from natural gas, surpassed all other countries this year with daily output […]

Highly Motivating Facts About Resource Depletion

Coal production in Britain peaked in 1913. World War I began the very next year. This is also when the Reserve Currency status of the British Pound Sterling began to fade as the world began to prefer the US Dollar. This is also around the time that the Federal Reserve was created and the US […]

UK’s complex geology will pose fracking challenge

The UK’s complex geology will pose challenges for fracking companies wanting to avoid water contamination in some parts of the country, according to the British Geological Survey (BGS). New maps of underground Britain released by BGS and the Environment Agency show that almost half the area of England and Wales where major drinking water aquifers […]

Saudi Arabia sends 30,000 troops to border with Iraq

Saudi Arabia deployed 30,000 soldiers to its border with Iraq after Iraqi soldiers abandoned the area, Saudi-owned al-Arabiya television said on Thursday, but Baghdad denied this and said the frontier remained under its full control. The world’s top oil exporter, Saudi Arabia shares an 800-km (500-mile) border with Iraq, where Islamic State insurgents and other […]

ISIS takes major Syrian oil field

The extremist Sunni militant group that recently declared a caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq wrested control of a major Syrian oil field in a sweeping land grab Thursday, a UK-based monitoring group said. A string of villages and towns along the Euphrates River fell like dominoes to the Islamic State in Iraq and […]

Data Deleted From UN Climate Report Highlight Controversies

When the United Nations’ last major climate change report was released in April, it omitted some country-specific emissions data for political reasons, a trio of new papers argue, sounding a warning bell about the global politicization of climate science. Written by thousands of science, policy, and economics experts from around the world, the UN International […]

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