Al-Naimi Says World Oil Market Is Not Oversupplied as Demand Fluctuating

Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali Al- Naimi said there’s no excess supply in world oil markets and that the kingdom has been adjusting output to match fluctuating demand over recent months. “There is no oversupply in the market right now,” he told reporters in Dhahran today. The country, OPEC’s biggest producer, will keep pumping at […]

Dieoff Debunked: EROEI, October 2011

So I haven’t posted for a while, mainly because I’ve been quietly living my life and not as doomers would assume busily packing away guns and ammo and MREs and fortifying my basement for the eventual onslaught of oil-apocalypse zombie accountants. True there’s been a *financial-world-induced* recession and low growth continues but far as I […]

Does Expensive Oil Inevitably Cause Recession?

There is a popular belief that once U.S. petroleum expenditures exceed some threshold, recession results. Writing at the Harvard Business Review blog, Chris Nelder and Gregor MacDonald present this position clearly:   “The connection between oil shocks and recessions has been understood for decades. We have ample historical evidence that when petroleum expenditures reach 5% of GDP, […]

Pakistan’s energy shortage

ALTHOUGH Pakistan makes international news for terrorist attacks, anti-American demonstrations and its alleged support for insurgents in Afghanistan, it is the basic inability to switch on a light that is pushing this volatile country closer to the edge. Popular anger over Pakistan’s crippling electricity shortage boiled over on to the streets this week, with riots […]

The other side of peak oil: Coping locally with upcoming global changes

Transitioning to post-peak oil Our small city is attracting some rather big names in the sustainability world lately. On the heels of anti-GMO activist Jeffrey M. Smith’s Sept. 19 talk at the Chico Masonic Family Center, Boulder, Colo.-based “transition movement” speaker/writer Dr. Carolyn Baker will be in town to give an evening talk, from 7 to 9 p.m. […]

The Rise and Fall of the Middle Class

The industrial revolution introduced the world to a new prosperity never seen before. New sources of energy enabled mechanized and automated industrial processes to increase per capita output and free up labor to participate in value-added activities. Energy from coal and oil substituted manual labor many times over, leading to faster transportation, faster construction, greater […]

The Peak Oil Crisis: Turmoil Erupts

The Financial Times and Wall Street Journal have gone into full crisis mode with live blogs continuously reporting unfolding events. Equity markets are falling and London oil prices have been flirting with $100 a barrel for the first time since February. Talk of recessions, depressions, and even collapse of the euro zone is everywhere. There […]

There Will Be Oil, But At What Price?

Daniel Yergin’s typically sunny outlook on oil in his recent Wall Street Journal piece, “There Will Be Oil,” suggested that technology and new energy discoveries would avert any of the economic disasters portended by peak oil. We found Mr. Yergin’s dismissal of these risks premature and repetitive. After all, he has asserted since 2004 that […]

The Saudi Budgetary Constraint on Oil Prices

You might imagine that the last decade has been pretty kind to Saudi government finances and you’d be right.  The graph above comes from a report on the Saudi government budget from Bank Saudi Fransi and shows government revenues and expenditures in billions of Saudi riyals (the riyal is pegged to the US dollar at 3.75 riyals per dollar). […]

Voices of Transition – trailer

‘Voices of Transition’ is an enthusiastic documentary on farmers- and community-led responses to food insecurity in a scenario of climate change and peak oil. Recorded in Cuba, France and the UK, those ‘voices’ tell us of of a future society where our deserts will once again be living soil, where fields will be introduced into […]

Saudi Arabia May Tap Reserves for Spending Plans

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, may be forced to tap its reserves to fund spending programs as oil prices drop below the kingdom’s breakeven budget price. King Abdullah this year announced a $130 billion plan to create jobs and build homes after uprisings toppled leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. While officials haven’t […]

Keith Johnson: Food Security and Resilence

Keith Johnson was raised in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (where he learned at an early age he was related to Johnny Appleseed), and has been a commercial landscaper, stonemason, and organic gardener since 1976 in places as varied as subtropical Bay Area of California, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Michigan, & the mountains of W. […]

The Third Industrial Revolution: Toward A New Economic Paradigm

Our industrial civilization is at a crossroads. Oil and the other fossil fuel energies that make up the industrial way of life are sunsetting, and the technologies made from and propelled by these energies are antiquated. The entire industrial infrastructure built off of fossil fuels is aging and in disrepair. The result is that unemployment […]

China To North America: Send Us Your Oil

As Americans quarrel over whether fossil fuels belong in their future, Asian countries are taking a powerful message to Washington Thursday: Ship your oil and gas to us. The case for the establishment of a transpacific energy market involving the United States and Canada as exporters, and Asian countries including China, Japan and Korea as […]

Food Prices Still Elevated

It’s been a few months since I checked the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index.  The above shows the latest data (through August).  As you can see, food prices, after rising very sharply in 2010, have stabilized near their recent peak level.  Presumably this has been aided in part by the slowdown in the global […]

Richard Heinberg: why end of growth can mean more happiness

Richard Heinberg- whose latest book describes The End of Growth- isn’t looking for when the recession will end and we’ll get back to “normal”. He believes our decades-long era of growth was based on aberrant set of conditions- namely cheap oil, but also cheap minerals, cheap food, etc- and that looking ahead, we need to […]

BP CEO says sees Brent crude prices at $90-$100/barrel

Brent crude oil prices are seen at around $90-$100 a barrel, BP group chief executive Bob Dudley said on Wednesday, without elaborating. On Wednesday, Brent futures LCOc1 lost 78 cents to $106.36 a barrel by 0628 GMT, after falling more than a dollar earlier. U.S. crude CLc1 shed $1.23 to $83.23 a barrel. Oil prices […]

U.S. Military to Spend Big on Alternative Energy

The Riverine Command Boat (Experimental) is powered by a 50/50 algae-based and NATO F-76 fuels blend to support the Navy’s efforts to reduce total energy consumption on naval ships. (U.S. Navy photo) According to a new study: From Barracks to Battlefield: Clean Energy Innovation and America’s Armed Forces [PDF], by Pew Charitable Trusts, the U.S. […]

Cities use up 75 per cent of the world’s energy

The impact of cities “Cities are 2 per cent of the Earth’s crust but they are 50 per cent of the world’s population,” says Carlo Ratti, the head of MIT’s Senseable City Lab. Cities also consume 75 per cent of the world’s energy, he told CNN.com. Is your job in peril? “If you’re taking a […]

Peak Oil keynote by Randy Udall and sustainability conference call for participants

Local Future invites visionaries, activists, and leaders to apply to The 2011 International Conference on Sustainability, Transition and Culture Change: Vision, Action, Leadership (VAL). Participants include: Dr. Steve Keen received the Revere Award from the Real World Economics Review in 2010 for most cogently warned of the crisis, and whose work is most likely to […]

Did We Hit Peak iPads Already?

The whole world worries about hitting peak oil. That’s the point where oil consumption will outpace production until the end of time, digging into reserves instead of building them. All good things must end, you know. Today, JPMorgan theorizes that Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL ) might have hit a similar peak for the iPad. Inventing a […]

The upside of economic worries: Lower gas prices

Soaring gasoline prices are in the rearview mirror. For the first time in months, retail gasoline prices have fallen below $3 a gallon in places, including parts of Michigan, Missouri and Texas. And the relief is likely to spread thanks to a sharp decline in crude-oil prices. The national average for regular unleaded gasoline is […]

Rob Hopkins: Making The Red Pill Taste Good

Rob Hopkins is a true pioneer of the movement to intelligently prepare and adapt society for entering a post-Peak Oil future. His brainchild, Transition Towns, has been one of the most successful initiatives to date in inspiring hundreds of cities, towns, and communities around the globe towards using local cooperation and interdependence to shrink their […]

Food becoming driving force of world political affairs

The recent outbreak of famine in Somalia, which has caused numerous deaths and the flow of thousands of refugees to neighboring countries, has put the food factor at the heart of world political debate. Talking to Sunday’s Zaman, European Affairs Minister Egemen Bağış said that in the face of an increasing population, water scarcity and […]

Peak Oil – Futurist Glen Hiemstra with James Kunstler

Futurist Glen Hiemstra, Founder of Futurist.com, interviews author James Howard Kunstler in 2008. This is the full interview, previously available on YouTube in 3 parts. They discuss Mr. Kunstler’s 2008 novel, World Made by Hand. The interview explores the unwinding of the oil age and what it might mean to civilization. Mr. Kunstler, one of […]

IEO 2011: A Misleadingly Optimistic Energy Forecast by the EIA

The EIA published International Energy Outlook 2011 (IEO 2011) on September 19, showing energy projections to 2035. One summary stated, “Global Energy Use to Jump 53%, largely driven by strong demand from places like India and China.” It seems to me that this estimate is misleadingly high. The EIA is placing too much emphasis on […]

China’s oil demand continues to slow from its torrid rate

All the signs point to a continued softening of Chinese demand in this month’s Platts survey. The most relevant figure might be the rate of growth year-on-year. It’s still high, but it’s less than 7%. It was regularly double-digits just a few years ago. You can read Platts analysis here.

BRIC nations call for fertilisers output hike

BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) yesterday joined Africa in calling for effective measures to convert challenges into opportunities for enhancing the production of fertilisers in view of the rising demand due to burgeoning world population. Diverse perspectives on current climate in the internal fertiliser market were highlighted at the concluding day of the […]

Per Capita Oil Consumption Around the World

Following up on yesterday’s post of global oil production per capita, the above graph shows oil consumption per capita for an illustrative selection of countries around the world (along with the world line in black for comparison).  You can see that the developed countries all had peak consumption in the 1970s, fell in the early […]

The Incredible Global Transition Back To Coal

There are many unfortunate outcomes to Peak Oil. One of the more serious is the world’s transition back to coal. Expensive BTU from crude oil has influenced the energy adoption pathway of the Developing World for ten years now, pushing the five billion people in the Non-OECD towards coal. My work has documented this shift […]

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