Implications of the peak oil crisis

Implications of the peak oil crisis

Kurdistan Warns Oil Output at Risk of Collapse

Oil producers in Iraqi Kurdistan will have to close operations if they don’t receive agreed export payments, according to the regional authorities. “We need to stabilize the payment situation,” Ashti Hawrami, natural resources minister for the Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG, said Tuesday in London. “We can’t keep saying to oil companies: ‘Give us one […]

Egypt Seeks to Reduce Fertility

Egypt aims to reduce its surging fertility rate over the next 15 years, a government minister said Tuesday, in an effort to address overpopulation concerns in the Arab world’s most populous country. With around 90 million people — a population the United Nations projects to hit 103 million by 2030 — Egypt has struggled for […]

G7 leaders agree to phase out fossil fuels

Leaders of the world’s top economies Monday (8 June) gave a boost to global talks on tackling climate change by saying the global economy should be decarbonised by the end of this century. The high-level backing by G7 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US – increases the likelihood of […]

Conventional Crude Oil Production Reaches New High

Since May 2005, global conventional crude oil + condensate production (C+C) has been constrained to a bumpy plateau of around 73.2 Mbpd. That limit was breached in December 2014 with a new high of 74.28 Mbpd (Figure 1, blue area is conventional C+C). This comes on the back of a prolonged period of record high […]

The Bakken ”Red Queen” is restrained with more credit

This post is an update on Light Tight Oil (LTO) extraction in Bakken based upon published data from the North Dakota Industrial Commission (NDIC) as per March 2015. Extraction developments of LTO from Bakken may be followed by county, formation, vintage of wells, and one important source to understand the developments are coming from studying […]

There Must Not Be Peak Oil

In this post, I explain the logic of wishful thinking and plain denial that rules on the Earth in most matters that matter (population growth, power – energy per unit time – supply, water supply, food supply, progressing destruction of planetary ecosystems, and so on). I imply throughout that without an ample and continuous supply […]

Islamic State to Issue Its Own Currency

They have paraded their own flag, formed courts and ministries, issued passports and even license plates. Now, the leaders of the Islamic State, the violent jihadist group that has seized parts of Syria and Iraq, have created their own currency, part of a grandiose plan to restore the caliphate era that dominated the Middle East […]

Can We Decouple Living Standards from Energy Consumption?

Highlights Reductions in energy intensity is arguably our most important tool to achieve a sustainable energy future Developed nations have reduced energy consumption since the financial crisis and the US has seen continued GDP growth However, household income (proxy for living standard) has declined with energy consumption in the US This trend poses serious questions […]

Albert Bates: The Road to Paris

“These talks are not just about streamlining a text; they are about realizing, at a deeper level, the scope of the problem and the required scale for any response.”    Newspaper reporting legend Ross Gelbspan once said, lifestyle change is essential, but lifestyle change won’t get us out of this climate mess. We need change […]

Are We Measuring Energy Use All Wrong?

We measure energy use with a commodity-based approach — monitoring electrons, therms and gallons. But is there a better way to gauge the efficiency of the economy? Energy economist Skip Laitner has been exploring a new method based on measuring “exergy,” which shows that America’s economy is only 14 percent efficient. And he says it’s […]

What if the Worst-Case Scenarios Actually Come to Pass?

Imagine this, if you can: the world as we know it torn apart by ‘hypercanes’, storms with wind speeds of over 500 mph, capable of producing a system the size of North America. A tiny fraction of humanity driven to a civilisation underground, the remaining masses left to fend for themselves on the virtually uninhabitable […]

Iran and Saudi Arabia on a collision course over oil

After a week of meetings of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) in Vienna, one thing is clear: Iran and Saudi Arabia are on a collision course that could eventually break the world’s largest oil producing group apart. Faced with Saudi Arabia’s stubborn determination to keep Opec pumping at full choke, Iran’s oil […]

Egg rationing in America has begun

In recent days, an ominous sign has appeared throughout Texas. “Eggs [are] not for commercial sale,” read warnings, printed on traditional 8 1/2-by-11-inch pieces of white paper and posted at H-E-B grocery stores across Texas. “The purchase of eggs is limited to 3 cartons of eggs per customer.” H-E-B, which operates some 350 supermarkets, is one of […]

Day After EPA Finds Fracking Does Not Pollute Water, Top Oil Regulator Resigns Over Water Contamination

Put this one in the awkward file: just hours after the EPA released yet another massive study (literally, at just under 1000 pages) which found no evidence that fracking led to widespread pollution of drinking water (an outcome welcome by the oil industry and its backers and criticized by environmental groups), the director of the […]

Yemen Fire Scud Missile Into Saudi Arabia

Just two days after reports indicated that Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels were prepared to participate in UN-brokered peace talks with Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government in exile, clashes on the Saudi border have intensified. On Friday, the Saudi press agency said it had used Apache helicopters and artillery to repel a Houthi-led advance, killing “dozens” […]

Russia to Start Iran Crude Imports

Russia may start importing crude from Iran next week as part of an oil-for-goods agreement, Iranian Energy Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said. “We hope that next week” Russia will take its first imports, Zanganeh told reporters on board a plane from Vienna late on Friday, after attending a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting […]

Exxon at the crossroads: buy a rival or shrink

But the company’s focus on cash distributions to shareholders, and the fact that its oil and gas production is lower now than immediately after Exxon bought Mobil back in 1999, certainly look like evidence that it has given up on long-term revenue growth. Exxon is the world’s largest listed energy group, and like all big […]

7 Epic Droughts Devastating the Planet

Every inhabited continent, to varying degrees, faces extremely high water stress. That means that in certain areas more than 80 percent of the local water supply is withdrawn by businesses, farmers, residents and other consumers every year. Not all of that water is consumed—it may flow back into a river after it’s used and be […]

Winners and Losers When Oil is $50 a Barrel

Major technological advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) have dramatically expanded U.S. oil and gas production. By year-end 2014, U.S. daily crude oil production from shale layers had increased 230 percent over 2010 levels, and total U.S. crude oil production had risen 67 percent. Despite that dramatic, unprecedented growth, the price of West […]

The Future History of Political Economy

Ecological Economics and its corollary, Steady State Economic thinking, represent a step forward for the discipline of economics and also a return to how it was practiced in the past. In the nineteenth century, economics was a part of a larger enterprise: political economy, the integrated treatment of morals and economics, ultimate ends and efficient […]

Kuwait wants 40% hike in oil and gas production by 2020

Kuwait’s oil minister has confirmed plans to hike hydrocarbon production to 4 million barrels per day, by 2020, almost 40 percent more than the current level. The announcement comes ahead of the awaited OPEC meeting this Friday. “We have discovered new reserves… that contain both oil and gas. This will support Kuwait’s plans to increase […]

OPEC finds oil output consensus: ‘Don’t rock the boat’

OPEC is set to carry on pumping oil nearly flat-out for months more, content that last year’s shock market therapy has revived demand and knocked back growing competition. With oil prices having stabilised at around $65 a barrel, some $20 above their January lows, there’s little appetite within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries […]

The Era of Breakdown

The fourth of the stages in the sequence of collapse we’ve been discussing is the era of breakdown. (For those who haven’t been keeping track, the first three phases are the eras of pretense, impact, and response; the final phase, which we’ll be discussing next week, is the era of dissolution.) The era of breakdown […]

China is hoarding cheap oil in a fleet of supertankers

As Middle East oil producers drive prices lower and make life difficult for the U.S. fracking industry, one clear winner is emerging: China The world’s second-largest economy become the top oil importer in April. The key reason? China is taking advantage of cheap oil to boost its strategic reserves. “They’ve been building out strategic storage. […]

Natural Gas Will Chop Away at Oil’s Dominance as Transportation Fuel

A new study by IHS forecasts significant growth and value in the market for natural gas as a fuel in the heavy-duty transportation sector. The report, “LNG in Transportation: Challenging Oil’s Grip,” says that the use of natural gas as a transportation fuel could displace more than 1.5 million barrels per day (mbd) of oil […]

Peak Sweet and Peak Easy : Twenty Years to Transition

It may not be immediately obvious that significant change is underway in the energy sector. Heavily-capitalised and strongly-invested petroleum oil and gas companies stride the lands and seas, seeking what still fruitful part of the Earth’s lithosphere they may devour. Billions of overweight road and air vehicles incessantly burr and rattle, draining the carbon lifeblood […]

Frack Study Finds No Impacts on Drinking Water

A draft assessment of the potential impacts to drinking water from hydraulic fracturing (fracking), released Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said the agency found no systemic impacts to date to drinking water, but there are “potential vulnerabilities.” The 998-page draft assessment “shows that while hydraulic fracturing activities in the U.S. are carried out […]

US Crude oil production heading 11 to 15 million barrels per day

The latest Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecast for US crude oil production is for an increase to about 11 million barrels per day and then having a plateau. When US crude oil production gets past 10.1 million barrels per day then it will have passed the old production peak in 1970. This will take a […]

Will Demand for Oil Peak by 2035?

Many are familiar with peak oil theory — the idea that global oil production will hit a ceiling and then decline — yet the concept of peak oil demand, where demand will plateau before supply, appears to be replacing this controversial hypothesis. Amy Myers Jaffe, Executive Director of Energy and Sustainability at UC Davis, recently […]

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