Peak Oil Isn’t Here But It Could Be In Sight

By one oil consultancy’s estimate, Peak Oil will be here by 2028, or two years sooner than it previously had predicted, according to Reuters. That ceiling would be somewhere north of 100 million barrels per day, just above the rate hit in 2019. And while normally one might dismiss this as a mere educated guess, […]

The Severity of Global Hunger 2020

Most Americans do not regard hunger as a problem, let alone understand the magnitude of its scope. If you really want to know about the severity of the global hunger – and if you are willing to do something about it, read on.According to World Hunger Day.org and Mercy Corps: More than 820 million people […]

Global Oil Demand Hasn’t Yet Peaked, Energy Watchdog Predicts

Global oil consumption hasn’t peaked, the head of the International Energy Agency warned, throwing cold water on hopes the coronavirus will cap demand and reduce climate-changing emissions. “In the absence of strong government policies, a sustained economic recovery and low oil prices are likely to take global oil demand back to where it was, and […]

Steady State Economics: We’ve Got Some (Systems) Thinking To Do

In this time of impending economic and ecological crises, we urgently need to aim for a sustainable or ‘steady state’ economy. In order to get there, we will need to adopt a ‘systems-thinking’ outlook taking into account the interconnections of our complex world. We will also need to consider the issue of de-growth, and re-prioritise […]

Crisis Hits Oil Industry and Energy Transition Alike

While it attempts to cushion the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, the Latin American and Caribbean region also faces concerns about the future of the energy transition and state-owned oil companies. These questions were discussed at the 29th La Jolla Energy Conference, organised by the Institute of the Americas. It was held online May 18-22, […]

Oil Market Rationalizes Economic Activity

“Davidson” submits: Looking at the details, the higher $WTI pricing becomes evident. US Crude Production has fallen to 11.5mil BBL/Day Exxon restart refinery-Refinery Inputs rise Gasoline Inv rise a little but US Crude Inv falls ~5mil BBL     Oil prices are rising sharply with the early evidence supplied from Initial Unemployment Claims falling rapidly […]

From Energy Transition to Energy Reduction

With the wholesale price for US crude oil famously, if briefly, turning negative recently, and – slightly less famously – with commenters in a thread under my last post suggesting that it’s technically straightforward to transition the existing energy system largely to renewables, it feels the time is right to address some post-lockdown and post-carbon energy realities. […]

From Supply Glut To Energy Shock

Summary Oil demand dropped from a record peak of 100 mbd reached in 2019 to a recent low of 70 mbd. At $20 oil, no one is making money and if prices continue at these levels for the next year, just about every oil company will be on life support or out of business, including […]

Peak Oil Isn’t Here But It Could Be In Sight

The huge drop-off in demand for oil because of the coronavirus pandemic has some analysts talking about Peak Oil, something we’ve been talking about in these parts for what seems like forever. It still doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime in the near-term, though because of the slow rise of electric cars, we are getting […]

A Huge Fleet Of 117 Tankers Is Bringing Super Cheap Crude To China

While the rest of the world is tentatively coming out of lockdowns, China is taking advantage of the cheapest crude oil in years to stock up as demand is starting to return in the world’s largest oil importer, Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing tanker-tracking data it has compiled. At present, a total of 117 very large crude […]

Oil Posts Two-Month High

Oil rose to levels not seen since Covid-19 lockdowns paralyzed the world’s largest economy, lifted by signs of recovering demand and news of a viable coronavirus vaccine. Futures in New York climbed 8.1% Monday, the highest level since mid-March. Chinese oil use is at 13 million barrels a day, just shy of the levels of a year […]

The slow burn of a long-term slowdown

We’re not in a space race anymore, or an arms race, or any kind of race right now. And even if we were, it doesn’t seem like we’d be winning. As fast-moving as it may feel, the world has really been slowing down for decades. From the global population, to the economy, to technology, the […]

BP chief weighs odds of ‘peak oil’ demand

BP’s new chief executive said the coronavirus hit to crude consumption was likely to endure beyond the pandemic — and may even have ushered in “peak oil” demand. Bernard Looney, who took the top job at the UK energy major in February, told the Financial Times that the Covid-19 crisis was only “adding to the […]

Cars Making a Comeback, Stimulating Oil Recovery

James Li, a public relations account director, would rather spend an hour sitting in Beijing traffic than risk 30 minutes exposed to crowds on a train. “Traffic is as bad as it could be” but the subway is still too dicey, he said. In Frankfurt, real estate assistant Anna Pawliczek is driving to work for […]

Oil Expected to Reach $100 Again

The oil price has been predicted to hit $100 per barrel in around 18 months. The oil price will hit $100 per barrel in around 18 months. That’s what Orascom Investment Holding Chairman and CEO Naguib Sawiris believes, a new CNBC television interview has revealed. “I actually believe that in, let’s say, 18 months from […]

Oil Metric Shows Demand Comeback

A gauge of the oil market indicates that demand is rebounding but the comeback should be gradual, according to one market-watcher. Keep reading to learn more about this indicator and additional insights about this oil market from Rigzone panelists in the following review of the past week’s market developments. Rigzone: What were some market expectations […]

Visualizing America’s Energy Use, in One Giant Chart

Have you ever wondered where the country’s energy comes from, and how exactly it gets used? Well now, thanks to Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins, we have the answer as The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) crunches the numbers every year, outputting an incredible flow diagram that covers the broad spectrum of U.S. energy use. The […]

Arc of peak oil: From empty wells to demand destruction

The world once debated whether oil wells would run dry. Now, with crude flooding the market, the debate has turned to whether oil companies can sell enough of it. If peak oil is a relic, the question now is if we’ve hit peak oil demand. The debate, like nearly everything these days, is stoked by […]

Responding to Collapse, Part 16: Shortages of Money

A few posts back I said that shortages of electrical power, diesel fuel and money will be at the heart of the troubles that lie ahead for small remote communities as collapse progresses. I am interested in that sort of community because that is where I am recommending that you take refuge in order to […]

The global food supply chain is passing a severe test

IF YOU LIVE in the rich world and want an example of trade and global co-operation, look no further than your dinner plate. As the lockdowns began in the West two months ago, many feared that bread, butter and beans would run short, causing a wave of stocking-up. Today, thanks to fleets of delivery lorries […]

Is An Oil Supply Shortage Inevitable?

Oil prices are rising as supply shut ins mount and oil demand seems to be turning a corner. Some oil market analysts even warn that a supply deficit could be on the horizon, one that could balloon in the coming years because of the damage done today. Demand remains sharply down, but April is widely […]

Airline transportation after the epidemic. The problem is being solved, but not the way you would have imagined

  That’s how a hydrogen-powered plane could look like. Honestly, it is not very impressive: it looks more like an Elvis sighting and one may even reasonably doubt that this thing could fly. If it were easy to power planes using hydrogen, someone would be working at real prototypes rather than just these drawings.  Airlines […]

On the Far Side of Silence

Over the last few months I’ve been discussing the forgotten (or, rather, systematically ignored) history of American occultism, partly because it’s interesting in its own right and partly because it offers a good functional escape hatch out of the rigidly dualistic vision that has so tight a stranglehold on so many people’s ideas of the […]

Oil Is Crashing Again. It Could Take Whole Governments Down With It.

The past few years have vindicated many long-ignored prophecies of impending catastrophe (from the political to climatic to epidemiological). But “peak oil” isn’t one of them. Far from running out of that growth-fueling, climate-destroying black gold, humanity has more crude on its hands than it knows what to do with. The world-historic scale of the […]

Reimagine our priorities

Times of crisis stress a culture, and produce shifts in the balance of power within a society. As the Black Plague burned through Europe in the 1300’s, killing many peasants, it created a labor shortage that forcing society to shift from a feudal economy to one based on wages. When the Soviet Union collapsed at […]

Oil Price Collapse –> Next Peak Oil Frenzy?

Guest “oil’s well that ends well” by David Middleton The ChiCom-19 hostage crisis certainly makes strange bedfellows. Over the past few weeks I have been agreeing with Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price on the need to end the hostage crisis now. In the 35 years, Mr. Price has served as a county commissioner, I […]

Coronavirus Pandemic Could Spark Famines Of “Biblical Proportions”

What the head of the UN’s World Food Program just said should be making front page headlines all over the globe.  Because if what he is claiming is true, we are about to see global food shortages on a scale that is absolutely unprecedented in modern history.  Even before COVID-19 arrived, armies of locusts the […]

Is this the end of the oil era?

Is the concept of “peak oil” dead? Maybe, but not for long. What is happening now already occurred 25 years ago. We are living through a zombie oil market, a return of the oil era circa 1995, the last time demand was only 70 million barrels per day (bpd). Until this pandemic-induced crash, we were […]

Why Oil at Negative $100 Isn’t a Crazy Bet Anymore

Orbiting hundreds of miles above the Earth, the Sentinel-1 satellites are the eyes in the sky that show why U.S. oil prices dropped below zero and why much of the world is likely to follow. The satellite bounces radar signals off the massive metal tanks that store oil and that data is used to calculate […]

Insight Conversation: Jeff Currie, Goldman Sachs

With the cuts in capex and crude oil production shut-ins, could we see a sharp rebound at some point? It’s important to emphasize that when you shut in oil production, it’s very different from shutting in, let’s say, a manufacturing process. It’s going to take time to bring it back online. We don’t know what […]

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