North Sea Discovery Contains 16M Barrels

Junior explorer Enegi Oil reported Thursday that new information acquired about Block 22/12b in the central North Sea, containing the Phoenix discovery, indicates that the field is likely to contain oil in place of at least 16 million barrels. Details of the well, including logs and reports, were made available in August 2014 – four […]

Fracking Fractures Argentina’s Energy Development

Unconventional oil and gas reserves in Vaca Muerta in southwest Argentina hold out the promise of energy self-sufficiency and development for the country. But the fracking technique used to extract this treasure from underground rocks could be used at a huge cost. The landscape begins to change when you get about 100 km from Neuquén, […]

A Billion Tons of Food Wasted Yearly While Millions Still Go Hungry

In his parody of the Michael Jackson hit “Beat It”, the American satirist and singer Weird Al Yankovic has a parent urging his son to eat the food on his plate, warning that “other kids are starving in Japan”. The parody has raised smiles since it was released 30 years ago, but today “Eat It” […]

We’re Sitting on 10 Billion Barrels of Oil! OK, Two

Lee Tillman, chief executive officer of Marathon Oil Corp., told investors last month that the company was potentially sitting on the equivalent of 4.3 billion barrels in its U.S. shale acreage. That number was 5.5 times higher than the proved reserves Marathon reported to federal regulators. Such discrepancies are rife in the U.S. shale industry. […]

Singapore: Population Growth May Exceed Resources

Overall population growth has been a visceral issue since the last election, reaching a peak of discontent with the publication of the White Paper on the working assumptions up to 2030. Many were equating the matter solely with living space and job scarcity if the population grew to between six and seven million, bumped up by […]

Schools of Thought on Degrowth

The economy of the future is described by different groups with different words in different languages and they do not always exactly translate into an identical idea. However, the words, like “Degrowth”, “Decroissance”(French) or “Postwachstum”(German) share an idea of contraction of the economy in order to stay within ecological limits while at the same time […]

Energy Efficiency Backfire in Emerging Economies

Countries that expect to consume much more energy will likely experience higher levels of energy efficiency rebound, concludes a new Breakthrough report, recently released. Rebound is the phenomenon in which energy efficiency measures increase demand for energy, which diminishes expected energy savings. Lighting, Electricity, Steel: Energy Efficiency Rebound in Emerging Economies presents three historical case studies […]

Grieving Could Offer A Pathway Out Of A Destructive Economic System

Is it possible to hold all the grief in the world and not get crushed by it? I ask this question because our failure to deal with the collective and individual pain generated as a result of our destructive economic system is blocking us from reaching out for the solutions that can help us to […]

Has the US turned off the Islamic State’s oil spigot?

Having control of oil helped make the Islamic State the richest terrorist group ever. That’s one reason that U.S. and allied airstrikes have hammered its oil operations since late September. But two weeks later, one big question remains: Is the U.S.-led campaign succeeding in strangling the Islamic State’s golden goose? The terrorist group, also known […]

Keystone Be Darned: Canada Finds Oil Route Around Obama

So you’re the Canadian oil industry and you do what you think is a great thing by developing a mother lode of heavy crude beneath the forests and muskeg of northern Alberta. The plan is to send it clear to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast via a pipeline called Keystone XL. Just a few […]

In the US, a Turning Point in the Flow of Oil

The Singapore-flagged tanker BW Zambesi set sail with little fanfare from the port of Galveston, Tex., on July 30, loaded with crude oil destined for South Korea. But though it left inauspiciously, the ship’s launch was another critical turning point in what has been a half-decade of tectonic change for the American oil industry. The […]

Land O’ Lakes CEO: Food and agriculture will be the growth industry of our generation

Move over, Silicon Valley. According to Land O’ Lakes CEO Chris Policinski, the high-growth industry of the future is food production. “We operate in what I think is the best growth industry of our generation. There might be someone here who disagrees with me if you’re in consumer electronics,” Chris Policinski told a crowd at […]

Dark Age America: The Collapse of Political Complexity

The senility that afflicts ruling elites in their last years, the theme of the previous post in this sequence, is far from the only factor leading the rich and influential members of a failing civilization to their eventual destiny as lamppost decorations or come close equivalent. Another factor, at least as important, is a lethal […]

Head of Pentagon and C.I.A. Says Brace for 30 Year War with ISIS

Leon Panetta is pretty much the epitome of a status quo insider… “I vividly recall how, in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s killing, Obama partisans triumphantly declared that this would finally usher in the winding down of the War on Terror. On one superficial level, that view was understandable: it made sense if one assumes that […]

Pillars of the New Economy

Noel Ortega is Coordinator of the New Economy Working Group at the Institute for Policy Studies. 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 Noel about putting new economy ideas and principles into practice, a new […]

‘Sweet Spot’ Technology Could Cut Fracking 30-50%

An entrepreneur with roots in coalbed methane and his company are seeking collaborators to further test a technology that detects, identifies and quantifies hydrocarbons in shale oil and gas wells. Laramie, WY-based WellDog has been working with Royal Dutch Shell plc to adapt for shale oil and gas applications WellDog’s Raman spectroscopy technology, which it […]

China: The Dragon takes an oil breather

We’ve known it for the past decade: The primary factor underpinning strong oil prices was China’s fire breathing demand for more and more energy. Based on today’s updated outlook from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Dragon’s economy is pausing to inhale. And oil prices are showing signs of asphyxiating. But like breathing in and […]

An Economics Fit for Purpose in a Finite World

Causation is both bottom-up and top-down: material cause from the bottom, and final cause from the top, as Aristotle might say. Economics, or as I prefer, “political economy,” is in between, and serves to balance desirability (the lure of right purpose) with possibility (the constraints of finitude). We need an economics fit for purpose in […]

Energy Storage: Bright Future, But Challenges Ahead

The Energy Storage North America (ESNA) conference in San Jose, CA last week can be summed up in one word – optimism. The sanguine outlooks on market opportunities and trends were unanimous. Several vendors can’t manufacture their equipment fast enough to meet demand. California is making the market for energy storage. The ninth largest economy in […]

The Car That Runs on Sea Water – The nanoFLOWCELL Quant-E

Few Tech Metals Insider articles prompted as much reader feedback as our report on the Quant-E, a car produced by Nano-Flowcell AG of Liechtenstein. Back in March of this year, at the Geneva Auto Salon, its creators claimed the car used nothing but an electrolyte resembling sea water to operate. Since so many of you […]

The Tar Sands Bubble

The Canadian tar sands industry has seen better days. Energy giant Statoil announced last week that it would postpone a major mining project in Alberta for at least three years. It was just the latest in a string of major setbacks for tar sands oil, which has become nearly as bad for corporate profits as […]

IEA Acknowledges Rebound Effects

Clean Energy Equivalent of 4 to 19 Australias Required to Meet Gap Created by Rebound A new International Energy Agency report finally acknowledges the major role that efficiency rebound effects will play in future energy demand, and a Breakthrough analysis finds that the consequences are significant. Rather than their previous estimate of global rebound at […]

Human overpopulation: When no news is bad news

Last week, a high-profile study using the latest United Nations data revisited predictions of global population size. The news wasn’t good: Updated estimates using new statistical analyses suggest the world’s population will hit nearly 11 billion by 2100. There’s some uncertainty in this measure because birth and death rates may be changed by political and […]

Nobel laureates call for a revolutionary shift in how humans use resources

Eleven holders of prestigious prize say excessive consumption threatening planet, and humans need to live more sustainably Eleven Nobel laureates will pool their clout to sound a warning, declaring that mankind is living beyond its means and darkening its future. At a conference in Hong Kong coinciding with the annual Nobel awards season, holders of […]

Kunstler: Must Be the Season of the Witch

As the Governor goblins at the Federal Reserve whistle past the graveyard of dead Quantitative Easing, and the US dollar magically expands like a prickly puffer fish, and Mario Drahgi does what it takes with Euro duct tape to patch all black holes of unpayable debt from Athens to Dublin, and Japan watches its once-wondrous […]

Russia to seek gas compromise with Kiev but debt has to be repaid

Russia’s readiness to supply natural gas to Ukraine at $385 per 1,000 cu m “is our historical position, which is rather favorable for Ukraine”, Russian PM Dmitry Medvedev says Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev instructed Energy Minister Alexander Novak on Monday to continue gas talks with Ukraine. “We certainly need to continue searching for compromises […]

Smelly, contaminated, full of disease: the world’s open dumps are growing

Almost 40% of the world’s waste ends up in huge rubbish tips, mostly found near urban populations in poor countries, posing a serious threat to human health and the environment From the air, the Mbeubeuss waste dump 12 miles north of Dakar in Senegal looks innocent enough. Now 45 years old and close to the […]

Distraction, surveillance, peak oil and the end of the Internet

Let me be upfront about one thing: I don’t particularly want to be writing a blog, from which this article comes. But as I am an unpublished writer completing his first book in this early twenty-first century of ours, for what should be obvious reasons, I am. Why don’t I particularly want to be writing […]

CNG and LNG: the next big step in the field of alternative fuels?

A new EU directive will set forth ambitious goals regarding the use of CNG and LNG as alternative motor fuels. As a result, an overhaul of the relevant Hungarian legislation is expected. Many tend to believe that electricity is the sole workable solution in the field of alternative fuels. However, it is also expected that […]

Islamic State Steps Up Attack on Kurdish Syria Stronghold

Islamic State militants battled with Kurdish fighters for control of a strategic hill overlooking the Syrian town of Kobani on the border with Turkey, which the jihadist group has been besieging for three weeks. A tank and some militants standing next to a heavy machine gun were seen on the hill of Mistenur to the […]

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