Domestic Production Satisfies 84% of Total U.S. Energy Demand in 2013

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Monthly Energy Review, May 2014  Note: Supply equals domestic production, plus imports, plus stock change and other. Consumption equals supply minus exports. Total U.S. energy production reached 81.7 quadrillion British thermal units (quads) in 2013, enough to satisfy 84% of total U.S. energy demand, which totaled 97.5 quads. Natural gas […]

Second Natural Gas Pipeline to Link Russia, China

Russia and China could soon sign another major contract for gas pipeline construction after inking a landmark 30-year gas deal in Shanghai during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state visit in May, a senior Russian official said Wednesday. “Given the pace of Chinese economic growth … with an agreement on the compromise (gas) price formulas having […]

Time to be honest about our energy prospects

THE problem is not that there is not enough coal left underground; there is. But the task of lifting it, transporting it and using it depends on many other factors, most importantly on the continued availability of oil as a lubricant for all the machines involved in the supply chain, and as a fuel for […]

Scientists vindicate ‘Limits to Growth’ – urge investment in ‘circular economy’

The Earth has finite mineral resources, but humans are using them up faster than they can regenerate, with rising economic and environmental costs. According to a new peer-reviewed scientific report, industrial civilisation is likely to deplete its low-cost mineral resources within the next century, with debilitating impacts for the global economy and key infrastructures within […]

Heinberg: IEA Says the Party’s Over

The International Energy Agency has just released a new special report called “World Energy Investment Outlook” that should send policy makers screaming and running for the exits—if they are willing to read between the lines and view the report in the context of current financial and geopolitical trends. This is how the press agency UPI […]

Norway must ‘prepare for life after oil’

The IMF has called on Norway to cut back on spending its oil income, saying the economy needs no further stimulus and the government should focus on fostering private sector growth instead as it begins the long transition to life after oil. The budget has provided the economy with repeated stimulus even though it is […]

Peak Oil Is Not Coming…

It’s here. This IEA report spells out peak oil as being in the past. “Days of cheap energy over, IEA figures show” The IEA’s annual outlook on investment, released today, shows annual investment in new fuel and electricity supply has more than doubled in real terms since 2000. Costs to the oil and gas industry […]

New interest in natural gas as a transportation fuel

In recent years, in many parts of the world, natural gas supplies have increased due to new pipelines and hydraulic fracturing, leading to reduced prices for natural gas and wider geographic availability of vehicle refueling. As a result, interest has been renewed in utilizing natural gas as a transportation fuel to reduce both the use […]

IEA Expects World to Rely More on Middle East Oil

A top energy watchdog said the world will need more Middle Eastern oil in the next decade, as the current U.S. boom wanes. But the International Energy Agency warned that Persian Gulf producers may still fail to fill the gap, risking higher oil prices. In its first update to the agency’s energy investment outlook in […]

Kunstler: Coasting Toward Zero

In just about any realm of activity this nation does not know how to act. We don’t know what to do about our mounting crises of economy. We don’t know what to do about our relations with other nations in a strained global economy. We don’t know what to do about our own culture and […]

If we can’t change our economic system, our number’s up

It’s the great taboo of our age – and the inability to discuss the pursuit of perpetual growth will prove humanity’s undoing Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that […]

Transition Towns and Beyond: The Ecological Land Co-operative

James Dennis, Greenham Reach resident ELC director Oli Rodker, Marcus Tribe and Dingo the dog begin work at Greenham Reach. The Transition movement is a loose network of thousands of communities (ranging from favelas in Brazil to Japanese towns; from rural villages in England to Transition Los Angeles) unified in their drive to devise and implement […]

U.S. Petroleum Product Exports to Mexico Rise while Mexican Crude Exports to the U.S. Fall

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Note: The United States does not export crude oil to Mexico. The United States imported 850,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) of crude oil from Mexico in 2013, the lowest volume since 1993. In the past decade, U.S. crude oil imports from Mexico fell 47%, primarily as a result of declining […]

A Gathering of Silverbacks: Age of Limits 2014

“Whenever such large shifts in temperature occurred in Earth’s history, they were not gradual but came in lurches. Resilience is the capacity of a system to continue providing essential functions after receiving that kind of shock.” The first known use of the Infinite Improbability Drive was initiated by Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian on the starship Heart of Gold. Its major […]

World Bank warns of food riots as rising food prices push world populations toward revolt

A new report issued by the World Bank (1) warns that food prices are skyrocketing globally, with wheat up 18 percent and corn up 12 percent this quarter. Ukraine, one of the largest wheat exporters in the world, has suffered a 73 percent increase in domestic wheat costs. Argentina has seen wheat prices skyrocket 70 […]

The Path To Peak Water

Water is the lifeblood of humanity; it turns out it is in short supply. Like any other commodity high in demand, you should keep an eye on it for investment purposes as we get closer and closer to “peak water.” The overwhelming majority of global fresh water is locked up as ice or permanent snow […]

$4 gas fuels shock and awful words

Four-dollar gasoline has made an unwelcome and unexpected return. Prices of regular, unleaded rose to within a penny or two of $4 per gallon yesterday across central Ohio, according to GasBuddy.com, with a few retailers hitting the $4 mark. Analysts say the increase is because of a national surge in demand that is hitting the […]

U.S. Gasoline Consumption Plummets By Nearly 75%

Regular readers are familiar with my narratives on the U.S. Greater Depression, and (in particular) some of the government’s own charts which depict this economic meltdown most vividly. The collapse in the “civilian participation rate” (the number of people working in the economy) and the “velocity of money” (the heartbeat of the economy) indicate an […]

Converging Energy Crises – And How our Current Situation Differs from the Past

At the Age of Limits Conference, I gave a talk called Converging Crises (PDF), talking about the crises facing us as we reach energy limits. In this post, I discuss some highlights from a fairly long talk. A related topic is how our current situation is different from past collapses. John Michael Greer talked about prior collapses, but […]

Three Necessary Strategies Mitigating Peak Oil

Excerpted from John Michael Greer: “First is conservation. That’s the missing piece in most proposals for dealing with peak oil. The chasm into which so many well-intentioned projects have tumbled over the last decade is that nothing available to us can support the raw extravagance of energy and resource consumption we’re used to, once cheap […]

Energy Crunch: What’s the big picture?

Chart: Putting Weald shale oil in perspective – total recoverable reserves amount to less than half the UK’s annual demand: Source: The Carbon Brief Article: U.S. officials cut estimate of recoverable Monterey Shale oil by 96% – The Monterey Shale formation contains about two-thirds of the nation’s shale oil reserves. It had been seen as an enormous bonanza […]

Peak oil and a sustainable economic model

Peak oil can be specifically defined as a hypothetical point in time where the global production of oil reaches its maximum output, after which all reserves will eventually decline until depletion. In scientific and policy oriented communities, the global production of oil has already surpassed peak oil calculations in 2010, and the evidence does not […]

Peak Oil Print Ads

GQ Magazine decided to run a controversial article about “Peak Oil” which dealt with the increasing economic and environmental cost of supplying the world with oil. We were asked to create print ads to highlight the issue of Peak Oil to an apathetic public. We showed the ubiquity of oil and oil by-products in our […]

Is Peak Car the metric for us too?

The theory of Peak Oil, advanced by geoscientist Marion King Hubbert, postulated that there would be a maximum level reached for global oil extraction. After the peak, he said, based on depletion of reserves, humankind will have to resign itself to reduction in availability of that natural resource and augment our energy feedstock with other […]

Orlov Reviews: Age of Limits 2014

I got back to the boat late last night, after an intense three days of presentations and discussions. This was my third year presenting at this conference, and I am at this point quite heavily invested in this annual event and have started to take on roles I didn’t even know existed when I first […]

Why Are Food Prices so High? Because We’re Eating Oil

Regardless of what we eat, we’re actually eating oil. Anyone who buys their own groceries (as opposed to having a full-time cook handle such mundane chores) knows that the cost of basic foods keeps rising, despite the official claims that inflation is essentially near-zero. Common-sense causes include severe weather and droughts than reduce crop yields, […]

The History Of The Global Economy Since 1000000 B.C.

I construct estimates of world GDP over the very long run by combining estimates of total human populations with largely-Malthusian estimates of levels of real GDP per capita. Population I take my estimates of human population from Kremer (1993), but it would not matter if I had chosen some other authority. All long-run estimates of […]

High Oil Prices And Peak Oil

The evidence is starting to stack up that 2006 will indeed be the year of peak world oil production. You only have to Google “peak oil” to find more, but here are three of the most compelling reasons for believing that the peak is almost upon us. As you walk through the cave you will […]

The Religion Of Consumerism

The notion of consumerism as the religion of the United States is nothing new. That said, Warren Pollock did an excellent job explaining just how corrosive this mindset can be to a society. We were particularly taken by the idea that since the vast majority of people define themselves almost entirely by their level of […]

China oil demand up a small amount…again

China’s apparent oil demand* in April rose 1.4% compared with the same month last year to 39.92 million metric tons (mt) or an average 9.75 million barrels per day (b/d), a just-released Platts analysis of Chinese government data showed.   The year-over-year growth in apparent oil demand in April was greater than the 0.5% recorded […]

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