Should $20 A Barrel Be The Real Price Of Oil?

Summary Since the low in January of 2016, oil prices have rebounded to a recent price around $54. Investor bullishness was driven by the belief in peak oil theory, the slow transition to electric and hybrid engines, and the use of the commodity oil as an investment in the China boom. What does history say […]

Putting It All Together…

Some simple themes today… Population growth, economic growth, and resultant energy consumption are inexorably slowing.  The Federal Reserve knows it can not stop this and is simply slowing the inevitable with interest rate cuts to incent greater consumption via skyrocketing credit/debt (particularly government debt….debt that is undertaken with no intent of ever repaying it and is really just pure monetization). The chart […]

Initiating a Global Citizens Movement for the Great Transition

Journey to Earthland is a recently released book by the Great Transition Initiative (GTI), a worldwide network of activist scholars with a unique purpose—to advance “a vision and praxis for global transformation”. Few civil society organisations have such a broad focus on transformational strategies towards a new global social-ecological system, as condensed and overviewed in […]

The Dutch Love Affair With Natural Gas: A Cautionary Tale

The story sounds familiar. For decades oil and natural gas drilling have been proceeding and creating prosperity for those involved. At some point significant earthquakes occur in areas where they were formerly very rare or nonexistent. Those quakes are linked to oil and gas drilling and production. The industry denies the link. The quakes continue, […]

Who’s Behind US Downward-Mobility?

President Trump blames Mexicans, Chinese and other foreigners for the plight of downwardly mobile Americans but the real culprits are his corporatist pals who grab the lion’s share of the wealth from U.S. global dominance, says JP Sottile. By JP Sottile Donald Trump kicked-off his presidency with the bold accusation that the “wealth of our […]

Why Oil Demand Forecasts Have Become A Guessing Game

Get yourself a ruler, a pencil and a piece of paper. Place the ruler at about 45 degrees and draw a line upward across the page. That’s what a chart of world oil consumption looks like over the past 30 years, give or take a few shakes off the line (Figure 1). That was easy. […]

On the Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by the Hill’s Group

SK is a professor emeritus in the department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering at a Major University in the USA. Corrections to the first and third equations were made on Feb 25, 2017. The report reviewed here claims to rely on thermodynamics arguments to predict oil’s price-volume trajectory going forward. Classical Thermodynamic analysis First a few […]

Peak Oil. The Energy Report

Oil is rising on peak oil concerns. OK, not the old failed ideology of “peak oil” but the fact that U.S. oil supply in the U.S. may have peaked as well as Exxon Mobil’s proven reserve. The American Petroleum Institute (API) in their weekly report said we had the first crude oil drawdown of the […]

The US is transitioning into a natural gas exporter

The United States is on track to become a net exporter of gas next year, driven largely by the growth of liquefied natural gas exports, according to the U.S. Energy Department. The U.S. started exporting LNG last year, courtesy of Houston-based Cheniere Energy, and the country is increasingly piping more natural gas to Mexico while, […]

Oil To $70? Or Down To $30?

Will oil prices rise to $70 per barrel this year or fall to $30? Depends on who you ask. Oil price forecasts are always all over the map, but the exceptional disparity between some projections for 2017 is pretty stunning. On the one hand, you have Citibank, which sees oil shooting up to $70 this […]

How the “Peak Oil” Story Crashed with its Price

In mid-2000, the world feared it was running out of oil. Speculators, in turn, became feverishly bullish on oil’s price. A 78% crash soon followed. Today, almost no one talks about “Peak Oil.”

Peak Oil? A Chaotic Transition is in Process

As the graphic shows, US gasoline inventories are at a 27-year record high. And yet, gas prices and oil prices continue to rise – having increased by about 30-40% (depending on the grade and source) in 2016. And as the second graphic shows, US gasoline consumption in the first part of 2017 is down 8% […]

UN Report Says Small-Scale Organic Farming Only Way to Feed the World

Even as the United States government continues to push for the use of more chemically-intensive and corporate-dominated farming methods such as GMOs and monoculture-based crops, the United Nations is once against sounding the alarm about the urgent need to return to (and develop) a more sustainable, natural and organic system. That was the key point […]

Iran to sign oil contract to sell Russia 100,000 bpd

Iran announced on Tuesday it will begin selling 100,000 barrels of oil a day to Russia within the next 15 days and receive payment half in cash and half in goods and services, the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) reported. Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh provided details about the deal after meeting Russian energy […]

The Cities of the Future Are Smart, Green, Connected Innovation Hubs

Humanity has come a long way since the very first cities began to emerge about ten thousand years ago. Today, places like New York, Tokyo and Dubai are centers of innovation and human progress. Urban projects globally are pushing the limits of engineering, design and architecture. Exponential technologies are being integrated into the very skeleton […]

America’s Crumbling Infrastructure

No matter what your particular political perspective is, if there is one thing that virtually everyone in the United States can agree upon it is the fact that America’s infrastructure is crumbling.  Previous generations of Americans conquered an entire continent and erected the greatest system of infrastructure that the world had ever seen, but now […]

Peak oil demand and why it’s basically impossible to predict

In the past, forecasters had a relatively simple method of estimating whether demand for oil would increase or decrease and by how much. For the most part, they simply looked at the economy. If people were making more money, it was safe to assume they would spend more, travel more and head to the car dealership more often. […]

Driverless Cars: Their Time Will Never Come

Can we just get real here for a minute? Our streets and highways are never going to be populated by a significant number of driverless cars. Any more than our lives are going to be enriched by attentive robots exhibiting artificial intelligence. We are no closer to deploying fleets of driverless cars now than we […]

Mining 24 Hours a Day with Robots

The local mining industry often justifies the tax breaks and incentives it receives on the basis it employs people in the mines (they usually claim to be a major employer but there seems to be little truth to that, employing around 1% of the workforce). MIT Technology Review notes that increasing automation of mine sites, […]

Smart technology could deliver peak oil, coal and iron ore before 2035

New report suggests rapid advances in data analytics and artificial intelligence could dramatically reshape energy and industrial sectors and save global economy up to $1.6tr Rapid advances in smart technology could fundamentally reshape the global economy and spell an end to future growth in carbon intensive coal, oil, and iron ore consumption by 2035, according […]

Peak Oil: Start With Reality

  [S]o we have this physical constraint that’s coming because of Peak Oil. There’s nothing we’re going to do about it. We can’t out-clever that. It’s just a constraint, it’s a limitation, there it is. We could manage it well or we can manage it poorly, but it’s there. We have a political system that’s […]

Wringing Oil From Your Beverages, Food, Stuff and Heat (How to Make Your Life Less Oily in 2017, Part III)

Part I: Taking Stock Part II: Squeezing Oil Out of Your Travel Part III: Wringing Oil from Your Beverages, Food, Stuff, and Heat Part IV: Helping Others Eschew Oil The American way of life is saturated with oil. Part I of this series had a nifty calculator to sum up your yearly oil use. If […]

Does the Australian LNG export experience foreshadow soaring U.S. natural gas prices?

Two times last winter Australians living in the country’s eastern region paid more than twice as much for natural gas as did Japanese customers taking delivery of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the same region. (Australia has three separate natural gas pipeline networks which create three domestic natural gas markets, Eastern, Northern and Western.) The […]

EV growth may force peak oil demand by 2035

Fast growth in electric vehicles (EVs) coupled with increased carpooling/sharing and autonomous driving may force peak oil demand by 2035, said the Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofAML) in its latest research report Global Energy Weekly. Even so, the incoming Trump Administration could well reverse some policies. An aggressive descaling of EPA’s (Environmental Protection Agency) […]

EIA: Short-Term Energy Outlook

  Forecast Highlights Global liquid fuels Implied global petroleum and liquid fuels inventories are estimated to have increased by 0.8 million barrels per day (b/d) in 2016. EIA expects the oil market to be relatively balanced in 2017 and 2018, with inventory draws averaging 0.1 million b/d in 2017 and builds averaging 0.2 million b/d […]

Shining a light on Kenya’s electrification

Reports on the success of Kenya’s electrification program seem too good to be true. Official figures suggest that the proportion of the population with access to electricity at home has increased from 27% in 2013 to 55% this year, putting the country on course to achieve its goal of 95% electrification by 2021. While the […]

The world needs fewer people, but our economy needs more

What would happen to B.C.’s real estate industry … if the world’s population and consequent in-migration to B.C. miraculously, or tragically, dropped? When I first learned that West Vancouver’s population was declining, amid what I thought was the inexorable arrival of 35,000 new people in the Lower Mainland each year, I enjoyed a little inside […]

Could 3-D printers hasten peak oil demand?

A global transition away from oil and gas is well underway as booming renewable energy sources and electric cars portend major changes for the industry. Last week BP outlined the challenges ahead, but the company’s crystal ball has yet to focus on the disruptive potential from what may be the biggest paradigm shift in manufacturing […]

Electric Cars – An Existential Threat For Oil?

Nobody would have predicted ten years ago, back when everyone was talking about Who Killed the Electric Car, that oil would someday have to fear the future of General Motor’s EV1. Practically none of the 1,117 units were still in commission in 2006 when the movie first aired, but today there’s a whole new fleet. […]

Qatar ‘Very Comfortable’ With Current Oil Prices

Al Emadi says government hasn’t decided on bond issuance Government is spending $500 million a week on capital projects Current oil prices are close to the level Qatar needs to finance spending, and the government hasn’t made a decision on whether to sell debt, according to Finance Minister Ali Al Emadi. “We feel very comfortable,” […]

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