Ten Million Reasons Why Cheap Oil Might Hurt The Philippines

Cheap oil should be a good thing for a country like the Philippines that imports almost all of its fuel, but there are 10 million reasons why that may not be the case. That’s how many Filipinos work overseas, many of them on rigs, tankers and as domestic help or construction workers in oil-producing nations […]

The Truth Behind Waste in Supermarket Supply Chains

I’m standing outside Sainsbury’s HQ, next to two friends dressed as a carrot and strawberry, with a refuse skip full of food waste, mounted on the back of a truck. We’re being told by the police and a security guard that we can’t enter the building to hand in a petition – signed by over […]

Global oil demand growth is slowing going into 2016

(John Kemp is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own) LONDON, Feb 3 (Reuters) – The United States was one of the biggest sources of oil demand growth in 2015 but the outlook for 2016 is much more muted, according to official forecasters. The U.S. transportation sector continues to send mixed signals […]

Radioactive Fracking: The Untold Natural Gas Story

A significant public health hazard associated with drilling for natural gas is from radioactive radon gas…

A Saudi-Russian Oil Détente? Not Likely

Moscow’s call for talks went nowhere, but oil prices jumped. Most oil analysts and traders were intrigued when Russia’s energy minister signaled on Jan. 28 that the Kremlin wanted to discuss oil production cuts with OPEC. After all, limiting supply may help bolster the collapsing price of crude, which is hurting all major petroleum powers. […]

The Opaque Process Of Collapse

The ultimate cost of protecting the privileges of the few at the expense of the many is the dissolution of the social order that enabled the rule of the privileged few. When I write about the demise of unsustainable systems, readers often ask me to describe the collapse I see as inevitable. This is a […]

The IEA’s Oil Production Predictions for 2016

The IEA Oil Market Report, full issue, is now available to the public. Some interesting observations: Non-OPEC oil supplies are nevertheless seen sharply lower in December. Overall supplies are estimated to have slipped by more than 0.6 mb/d from the month prior, to 57.4 mb/d. A seasonal decline in biofuel production, largely due to the […]

Whatever Happened to Peak Oil?

A few months from now, this blog will complete its tenth year of more-or-less-weekly publication. In words the Grateful Dead made famous, it’s been a long strange trip:  much longer and stranger than I had any reason to expect, certainly, when I typed up that first essay and got it posted on what was still, […]

The rise of humankind, in one mesmerizing map

Greg Rakozy Today, human influence has transformed almost every part of the globe. But looking at the span of human history, this wasn’t the case until quite recently. That’s one of the many lessons from a series of fascinating maps and charts from WorldPopulationHistory.org, which shows the explosive growth of the world’s human population from 1 […]

The Most Prolific Natural Gas Region Is In Decline

Summary In this piece, I decided to examine the decline rates, rig counts, and rig productivity numbers to see what the future looks like for the Marcellus shale. According to my findings, it looks as though output in the region is slated to fall hard this year unless rig counts rise materially. As the most […]

What is Energy Security? – Definitions & Scenarios

Download MP3 File What is energy security? For decades, presidents and pundits have talked about the importance of energy security as a vital national goal. But very few bother to define what the term really means and what achieving it would actually entail. That’s because energy security is complicated, and multi-dimensional.  It goes beyond over-simplified […]

Luxembourg is going to mine asteroids for minerals

Luxembourg is planning to go into space to mine minerals from asteroids — and it will get help from Google founder Larry Page. Luxemburger Wort, one of the country’s newspapers, reported that Etienne Schneider, Luxembourg’s deputy prime minister and minister of the economy, said the government would work with one of the world’s largest satellite […]

No peak oil demand until 2040

A peak in global oil demand is unlikely to occur before 2040 in a sub-$70 oil world, according to a research report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BoAML). Over the medium-term, low oil prices will influence the trajectory of demand growth in three key ways, the report entitled “Global Energy Weekly: Oil is back […]

Oil-based Economies Collapsing And That’s Great For America

With oil hovering around $30 a barrel, commodities prices in free fall, and China continuing to confront a series of market-rattling growing pains, global equities have entered full correction mode. The commodities-based global economy that has developed over the past 20 plus years is collapsing, and that’s a great thing over the long run for […]

The Science Of Forecasting Long-term Oil Prices: What Not To Do

In 1992, an M.I.T. working paper that I wrote noted that forecasts of the oil prices two and three decades into the future were usually strongly in error after a couple of years. No few readers told me that they interpreted the work to mean that it was not possible to predict long-term oil prices, […]

Gail Tverberg: Why Low Oil Prices Will Not Stimulate The Economy

Wall St for Main St welcome Gail Tverberg, who is an oil market analyst and the author of Our Finite World. Gail has covered the oil market for over a decade and her work can be found on The Oil Drum web site, Peak and Prosperity and other publications. In this podcast, we asked Gail […]

BP Profit Falls 91%

Adjusted profit drops year-on-year for six straight quarters Company’s net loss in 2015 is highest in at least 30 years BP Plc reported a 91 percent decline in fourth-quarter earnings after average crude oil prices dropped to the lowest in more than a decade. The company’s shares fell the most since August. Profit adjusted for […]

Kunstler: Ground Control to Captain Zhou Xiaochuan

Why would anybody suppose that the Peoples Bank of China might want to tell the truth about anything that was within their power to lie about? Especially the soundness of any loan portfolio vested unto the grasp of its tentacles? Of course, most of what China has done in speeding toward the wall of financial […]

The Era of Oil is Over

Leading petroleum geologists have published studies explaining that more than 95 percent of all recoverable oil has now been found. The world has not extracted all the possible oil from reserves but the global oil industry has reached its limit to produce cheap oil. Fifty years of extensive research and analysis has revealed global oil […]

Peak Oil: One-Sentence Problem-Solving

As is still the case—unfortunately, for all of us—there remains a sizeable number of individuals, organizations, and other associations determined at all costs [literally] to preserve the primacy of fossil fuels to power us into the future. Facts: good when they can be massaged to fit the partial-truth narrative required to breathe life into an […]

Surely This Problem Won’t Affect Me

On a daily basis, I receive emails from associates in the UK and Europe that speak of the sheer madness of allowing refugees in the millions to pour into Europe. The riot in Cologne, Germany, by some 1,000 men who sexually assaulted 90 women, and robbed and threatened others, offers insight as to the scale […]

The Oil Crash Is Kicking Off One of the Largest Wealth Transfers In Human History

Economists are still hotly debating whether the oil crash has been a net positive for advanced economies. Optimists argue that cheap oil is a good thing for consumers and commodity-sensitive businesses, while pessimists point to the hit to energy-related investment and possible spillover into the financial system. A new note from Francisco Blanch at Bank […]

Volt vs. Prius: What’s the Best Way to Use One Gallon of Gas?

Sam Boyle is holding one gallon of regular-grade gasoline. The color of apple juice, it has the hydrocarbon content of 98 tons of buried prehistoric plant matter. It’ll ping your credit card for about $3 at our local Southern California prices. And after being combusted in a car engine, two of its 20 pounds of […]

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