Is the World at ‘Peak Gold’?

This week, Chuck Jeannes told The Wall Street Journal that either this year or next, miners will have reached “peak gold.” Peak gold means that the amount of gold being pulled out of the earth will begin to shrink every year, rather than increase, which has been the case since the 1970s. Jeannes is the chief executive of the […]

An Energy-Related Reason Why US Healthcare Outcomes are Awful

Back in January 2013, the US Institute of Medicine published a report called U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health. This poor health outcome for US citizens is in spite of the US spending twice as much as a percentage of GDP on healthcare as other high-income nations. As an example of the […]

Voices and Reflections of the Community Resilience and New Economy Movement

This week PCI launches a new report, Weaving the Community Resilience and New Economy Movement: Voices and Reflections from the Field, based on a series of interviews and conversations with visionary leaders who are bringing to life a new economic vision with thriving, resilient communities at its heart. A movement is emerging in many places, […]

Why Gasoline Prices Vary So Much From State-To-State

Expand If you’ve ever driven cross-country you know how much the price of gasoline can vary, ranging from nearly $4.00 in San Francisco to just a hair over $3.00 in Roanoke, Virginia. What’s the deal? Give credit to higher taxes, distance from supply, and type of fuel. Taxes Expand The map above comes from The […]

Dethrone ‘King Dollar’

THERE are few truisms about the world economy, but for decades, one has been the role of the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It’s a core principle of American economic policy. After all, who wouldn’t want their currency to be the one that foreign banks and governments want to hold in reserve? […]

How The Islamic State Smuggles Oil To Fund Its Campaign

In less than three years, the Islamic State has had a remarkable rise from start-up militants to a cash-rich and capable extremist organization. The swift expansion is fueled, in part, by a massive oil smuggling operation in eastern Syria that has now expanded to Iraq, according to regional analysts and oil industry specialists. The Islamic […]

Peak Oil: Empty Promises

Americans only want to hear about the promise of ‘energy independence;’ they don’t want to hear that independence will ultimately mean higher prices. [1] Well that’s not a happy ending! Shouldn’t we expect this recent, great oil production boom to have supplied us with just barrel after barrel of lower-priced oil and gas for we […]

Drillers Piling Up More Debt Than Oil Hunting Fortunes in Shale

Floyd Wilson raps his fingertips against the polished conference table. He’s just been asked, for a second time, how he reacted when his Halcon Resources Corp. (HK) wrote off $1.2 billion last year after disappointing results in two key prospects. Wilson once told investors that the acreage might contain the equivalent of 1.2 billion barrels […]

OPEC unfazed by oil’s drop below $100

OPEC members seemed unconcerned by a slide in oil prices below $100 a barrel on Monday, with two officials from the producer group saying winter demand in coming weeks should support the market. Brent crude fell below $100 a barrel for the first time in 14 months, buckling on concerns about slower economic growth. [O/R] […]

Russia Sees Oil Output Edging Down In 2015

Russian oil production, a major source of government revenue, may decline slightly next year, having risen steadily since 2009, the Energy Ministry said on Monday. The ministry said oil production in 2015 was seen at 525 million tonnes (10.54 million barrels per day) compared to an expected 525.3 million tonnes this year. Last year’s oil […]

Iran launches Mideast’s largest LNG storage facility

Iran announced the launch of the Middle East’s “largest” liquefied natural gas storage facility in country’s northeast bordering Turkmenistan at an inauguration ceremony Sunday. The  liquefied natural gas (LNG) storage facility named “Shourijeh” can supply 4.8 billion cubic meters of natural gas and aims to reduce gas imports from Turkmenistan. Iran plans to boost its natural gas production […]

Israel Steals Gaza’s Offshore Natural Gas

While Gazans suffer from daily power shutdowns, Israel is signing an important deal to sell gas to Jordan, gas which, researchers say, was stolen from Palestinians. In addition to confiscating Palestine’s energy resources, Israel has destroyed Gaza’s only power station in its latest military offensive.       Photo: “Gaza electricity; ‘enemy of the (Jewish) […]

Tesla’s Gigafactory Finds a Home in Nevada

In a press conference Thursday afternoon, Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk announced that the company’s groundbreaking battery manufacturing facility (called a “Gigafactory”) will be located in Nevada. Shortly after Tesla announced plans to build the Gigafactory in February, several states in the southwest scrambled to compete for the final location. […]

A Stress Test for E.U. Energy Supplies

Europe is conducting two stress tests. One is on its energy suppliers, to see how badly they would fare if flows of Russian natural gas were disrupted. The other is on eurozone banks to ensure they are strong enough to finance economic recovery. It is hard to know which of the two stress tests is […]

Iran-Iraq Gas Pipeline Complete

“Iran’s gas will be fed into Al-Mansoureh power plant once the pre-startup tests on the pipeline (built to transport natural gas to Iraq) are complete,” an informed Iraqi source, who asked to remain unnamed, told FNA on Saturday. He said the supply of Iranian gas supplies should have already started, and explained that the Islamic […]

The more uncertain we are, the more careful we should be

Earthquake damage to the Sam Kee Laundry Building in Napa, California, August 2014. Photo by Jim Heaphy via Wikimedia Commons. Built in 1875, this historic structure was damaged by a quake on a fault that was only sketchily understood by geologists. Drone tour of the damage.(When I grew up in Napa, we were blissfully unaware of […]

No Possible Relevance Media

The greatest environmental catastrophe and resource crisis in human history is about to crash down on our heads. What is CNN talking about? Missing airplanes and dead celebrities. What is the New York Times talking about? Illegal alien children are cute–let’s give ‘em amnesty. What is NPR (No Possible Relevance Radio) talking about? The usual […]

US fuel markets still rely on imports

Some markets in the United States still rely heavily on imports to meet regional demand for petroleum products, the U.S. Energy Department said. The U.S. Energy Information Administration said exports of U.S. gasoline, jet fuel and other petroleum products averaged 3.7 million barrels per day in June, the last full month for which data are […]

On The Brink Of A Major Crisis: “This Will Be A Literal Collapse of the Entire Global Monetary System”

Discussions of the possible collapse of the U.S. dollar often center around how such an event will affect the domestic economy. But the dollar doesn’t just operate inside of a bubble. It is the world’s reserve currency for a reason. Some sixty-six countries world-wide either utilize it as their primary currency or peg their own currencies […]

The West Without Water

Dr. B. Lynn Ingram is a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley, California. The primary goal of her research is to assess how climates and environments have changed over the past several thousand years based on the geochemical and sedimentologic analysis of aquatic sediments and archaeological deposits, with a […]

Helping People Understand the Power Grid: The Story of Electricity

Recently, the Institute for Energy Research launched a project to help people gain a better understanding of the electric power grid, a marvel of modern society that most people take for granted — unless its product delivery is interrupted for more than a few minutes. This information project is timely, especially considering all of the […]

Canada’s oil sands

ONE of the bleakest scenes of man-made destruction is the strip mining of oil sands in the forests of Alberta, Canada. The sand is permeated with natural bitumen, a type of petroleum with the consistency of peanut butter. Once dug from the surface, the sand is hauled to an extraction plant where it is mixed […]

BP, found grossly negligent, may face $18 billion in gulf spill fines

Energy giant BP’s willful misconduct and gross negligence led to the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, a federal judge said in a ruling Thursday that exposes the company to billions of dollars in civil penalties. The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which BP leased and operated, exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico […]

Ten Reasons to Take Peak Oil Seriously

Forty years ago, the results of modeling, as presented in The Limits to Growth, reinvigorated a discussion about exponentially growing consumption of natural resources, ranging from metals to fossil fuels to atmospheric capacity, and how such consumption could not continue far into the future. Fifteen years earlier, M. King Hubbert had made the projection that […]

Why clean energy is ripe for U.S. growth

Rising energy consumption, new environmental concerns, and political uncertainty in the Middle East could boost the need for clean energy. As tensions in the Middle East mount precipitously, and show every likelihood of continuing for years or even decades, the U.S. needs to step up its efforts to achieve energy independence. Historically, the U.S. has […]

Ghana to Double Oil Production by 2017

Ghana will double crude production by 2017 as offshore deposits being developed by Tullow Oil Plc and Eni SpA start producing oil, Minister of Energy Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah said. Tullow’s TEN development will produce about 80,000 barrels a day by then, the minister said by phone today. Eni’s Sankofa Gye-Nyame deposit will pump 50,000 barrels, […]

North Sea Oil and Scottish Independence: where does the truth lie?

How much oil and gas is left in the North Sea? 16 billion barrels oil equivalent (boe) according to Sir Ian Wood or 24 billion boe according to Oil and Gas UK? The correct answer for official proved+probable reserves is between 8 and 9 billion boe, a figure that both DECC and Oil and Gas UK agree […]

Operation, Multiple Children

Not too long ago, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) launched a campaign to encourage Iranian couples to have more children. This was apparently in reaction to the steady decline of the fertility rate since 1984, as evidenced in the chart below based on World Bank data. This drop is the result of a number […]

Why the US should start selling oil out of the SPR

Economist Philip Verleger looks at the size of the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and then looks at the world’s hot spots, and sees a way to solve some of the problems of the latter with the former. He has contributed this guest blog to The Barrel. Russia’s adventurism in Ukraine, ISIS’s alarming advances in Syria […]

To Fear Peak Oil, Or to Pursue it? That is the Essential Limits to Growth Question

On a world in which fossil fuel burning is now in the process of setting off various events of geological scale, one of the things we could well hope for most is a peak in fossil fuel supply. Such an event would force countries and economies to adjust. To abandon business as usual economics and […]

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