Libyan Oil Sector Suffers Output Setback

Output Falls Below 700,000 Barrels a Day After Insecurity Forced Largest Oil Field to Shut Down Libya’s energy recovery has suffered its first major setback, with output falling below 700,000 barrels a day after insecurity forced the country’s largest oil field to shut down, oil officials said Wednesday. The North African nation’s oil production had […]

Return of the $3 Gallon?

Here is the price of gasoline in the U.S. so far this year: Gasoline prices in 2014 The national average price of regular unleaded, now at $3.38 a gallon, is down 8 percent from the end of June. Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at GasBuddy.com, thinks this year will bring the cheapest autumn gasoline prices since […]

Peak Farmland, Let’s Get Vertical

Agriculture has one hell of a footprint, occupying 37.6 percent of earth’s land area, or about 0.7 hectares (1.7 acres) per person to feed our world’s current population. “There is no activity that humankind engages in that has a bigger impact on the planet than agriculture,” Jack Bobo, Chief of Biotechnology and Textile Trade in […]

Bank commodity trading and the US Fed: An unfolding relationship

Last week something serendipitous happened. I went to what was ostensibly a briefing and news broke out. The news was that the big French bank BNP Paribas, after some high-level recruitment from a decamping JP Morgan Chase, intends to try and rebuild North American physical electricity trading to go along with its existing natural gas […]

John Michael Greer: Dark Age America The End of the Old Order

Lately I’ve been rereading some of the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. He’s nearly unique among the writers of American horror stories, in that his sense of the terrible was founded squarely on the worldview of modern science. He was a steadfast atheist and materialist, but unlike so many believers in that creed, his attitude toward […]

The Peak Oil Crisis: It‘s All Around Us

Ten years ago peak oil was assumed to be a rather straight forward, transparent process. What was then thought of as “oil” production was going to stop growing around the middle of the last decade. Shortages were going to occur; prices were going to rise; demand was going to drop; economies would falter; and eventually […]

Reason for Permaculture – Fossil Fuel Shortage, aka peak oil

I have been thinking about writing (or doing a podcast) along these lines for a while. The original plot was to do a podcast that talked about a whole bunch of different reasons that we should start apply the design system of Permaculture to pretty much everything we do…and believe me, it would easily fill […]

Deeper Saudi Oil Cuts Seen After Biggest Drop Since ’12

Saudi Arabia will need to keep cutting oil output to sustain prices above $100 a barrel, even after the kingdom’s largest reduction in two years, according to BNP Paribas SA and Societe Generale SA. The world’s biggest crude exporter told OPEC last week it pumped 408,000 barrels a day less last month, about as much […]

World Oil Production According to the EIA

A few days ago the EIA published the latest update to its International Energy Statistics. The data is updated through May 2014. The data on all charts below is through May unless otherwise stated and is in thousand barrels per day. Also, all data is Crude + Condensate. World C+C production was down 72,000 barrels […]

Pro-Iraq Coalition Challenged to Turn Talk Into Action

The U.S. has assembled an unlikely coalition of more than 40 nations with a shared stake in defeating Islamic State, an effort that’s counting on Iraqi troops and moderate Syrian rebels to retake and hold territory the extremists have seized. That’s something they haven’t done well in the recent past. Iraqi government troops fled in […]

The US shale oil boom is saving the world almost $5 billion a day

Oil prices continue to plunge today despite the beheading of another western hostage by the Islamic State, tensions between Russia and the West, and mayhem in Libya. As Quartz has reported, one of the main reasons is surging US oil production, which has made up for supply disruption almost barrel for barrel—and is also a bad […]

New Standard Aims to Certify “Responsible” Oil Sites

A wellhead at the Colombia drilling site recently certified as responsible by Equitable Origin. (Photograph courtesy David Poritz) In the Orinoquia region of Colombia, two oil fields run by Toronto-based Pacific Rubiales Energy last week became the first to be certified as “socially and environmentally responsible,” according to a new standard. The two sites produce […]

Living the New Economy in Jamaica Plain

Chuck Collins is a founder of Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition. As part of PCI’s “Weaving the Movement” project, a series of interviews and group conversations with leaders in the new economy and community resilience movements, we spoke with Chuck about the making the new economy real, bridging race and class divides, and more: Interview with […]

Peak Oil: The Mirage

Several months ago, one of this year’s better features on the subject of peak oil was offered by John Kaufmann in his article entitled: The Energy Independence Illusion. It’s an excellent read [adapted from a presentation to the World Affairs Council of Oregon this past march] for anyone interested in this topic. [Any quotes here […]

China Bans Use of Coal With High Ash or Sulfur to Fight Smog

China will ban sales and imports of coal with high ash or sulfur in a move to promote cleaner types of the fuel and improve the nation’s air quality. Coal with ash content of more than 40 percent and sulfur of more than 3 percent is banned from sales and imports into China starting Jan. […]

Earth’s Infrared Radiation: A New Renewable Energy Frontier ?

IEEE Spectrum has a look at a newly recognised form of ambient energy – Earth’s Infrared Radiation: New Renewable Energy Frontier?. The Earth continuously emits 100 million gigawatts of infrared heat into outer space. That’s enough to power all of humanity many thousands of times over. Capturing even a fraction of that would mean an […]

China discovers major gas field in South China Sea

China has discovered a major natural gas field in the South China Sea. It is the country’s first independent deep-sea discovery. CCTV’s  Han Peng reports. China’s deep water oil rig 981 is anchored in the South China Sea and has just discovered a major gas field. This newly discovered field contains the energy equivalent of […]

The Consequences Of Fracking: Two Clashing Views

Two academic studies of the health dangers of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have produced different conclusions. One, conducted by Yale University, said people living near fracking sites report increased health problems. The other, by Penn State University, says fracking water stays underground, far below the groundwater supplies that people use for drinking, and poses no […]

Tony Hayward: Sanctions against Russia could spur $150 oil

Western sanctions against Russia, coupled with ongoing political instability in Libya and the advance of ISIS militants in Iraq, could leave the global oil supply exposed and push up oil prices to $150 per barrel, former BP chief Tony Hayward has warned. The former CEO of BP and now chairman of Glencore Xstrata said the […]

Exporting US Oil to Mexico

  Mexico could become a major export destination for surplus US light crude oil, despite being one of the largest oil suppliers to the US, mainly of heavy oil. If structured as an exchange for other barrels, such exports might not require re-writing US oil export regulations, unlike sales to non-neighboring countries. Two of the biggest […]

A Flood of Energy Projects Clash with Mexican Communities

Since January, villagers and townspeople near the Los Pescados river in southeast Mexico have been blocking the construction of a dam, part of a multi-purpose project to supply potable water to Xalapa, the capital of the state of Veracruz. “Our rights to a pollution-free life, to decide where and how we live, to information, to […]

Escaping the city to ride out climate change and peak oil

Bugging out from Boston to Vermont My wife Sarah and I are moving to Vermont. I’ve been studying climate change and its interconnected problems for a year, and my research has brought me to the conclusion that a time of tremendous scarcity and uncertainty is upon us. So we’ve decided that it’s time to get […]

Ukraine cuts gas consumption

Ukraine cut its gas consumption by 14.6% – 4.5 bcm – year on year between January and July 2014, to 26 bcm, the Energy and Coal Ministry said. Consumption fell by 31.3% year on year in July, or 618 MMcm, to 1.4 bcm. Natural Gas Daily

Melbourne University research on Energy, Climate Change, Collapse, Resilience and Transition

Some of the most important academic research into mankind’s present and future is being conducted at the Melbourne Sustainability Society Institute at the University of Melbourne. Here are links to some of their most important papers Is Global Collapse Imminent? by Graham Turner. Dr Turner gathered data from the UN (its department of economic and social affairs, Unesco, […]

Denmark – the last of a dying breed

Denmark is the European Union’s (EU) only net exporter of oil. The Nordic state’s oil exports totalled approximately 13.7 million barrels of oil equivalent in 2013. This is in stark contrast to the EU’s only other significant oil producer, the UK, which became a net importer in 2004 and has experienced a steep decline in […]

Despite Decline in Some Regions, World Oil Consumption Still Seen Rising

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, International Energy Outlook 2014 The largest potential for growth in demand for liquid fuels lies in the emerging economies of China, India, and countries in the Middle East, according to EIA’s recently released International Energy Outlook 2014 (IEO2014). In the Reference case projection, world liquid fuels consumption increases 38% from […]

ISIS’ Next Target: The Suez Canal

Following ISIS blitzkrieg in which it took over nearly half of Iraq and a third of Syria in the blink of an eye, at which point it created its own Islamic State Caliphate resulting in Obama’s own personal war against the jihadists, some have wondered what is ISIS’ next step: surely its leadership will not […]

One Millionth Barrel Delivered from Arctic Field Offshore Russia

Almost a year on from an environmental protest on its Prirazlomnoye platform in the Russian Arctic, Gazprom Neft reported Monday that the Prirazlomnoye field has produced its one millionth’s barrel of oil. Located some 40 miles offshore northern Russia in water depths of up to 65 feet, the Prirazlomnoye oilfield is estimated to contain some […]

Are we on the path of ‘Limits to Growth’?

Probably the most important thing you need to know about the 1972 book entitled Limits to Growth is that it makes no predictions. Rather, the much maligned study provides scenarios for thinking about the future of resource use, pollution, population, food, and industrial production. Limits to Growth detailed three scenarios originally, one of them called […]

America: You’ve got three more years to drive normally

Three more years? That’s pretty scary! Surely there must be a mistake in that headline. First in a series Is it possible that average Americans could have a hard time driving only three years from now? Preposterous, to say the very least! Three more years to drive would be awful scary if it were true. […]

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