“Peak Gold Production” Hits In 2015

Several days ago we reported that as a result of persistently lower gold prices, driven down by a seemingly endless supply of paper gold (in the form of ETF selling and Bank of International Settlement “price discovery“) offsetting a seemingly unbridled appetite for physical gold, not only is one of the biggest marginal suppliers of […]

10 Huge Countries Without Their Own Oil

The world’s 1.635 trillion barrels of proved oil reserves are not evenly distributed among the globe’s 216 nations. Just three — Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Canada — account for nearly a third of the total.There are far more countries with no or very little oil than those countries with deposits that can be developed and […]

David Hughes: The Trouble with Optimistic Shale Gas Projections by the U.S. Department of Energy

On December 3, 2014, Nature published “Natural Gas: The Fracking Fallacy”, which suggested that the forecasts of the Energy Information Administration (EIA) for four major U.S. shale gas plays were wildly optimistic, based on a comparison to forecasts for the same plays by the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology (UT/BEG). This was followed by a formal […]

Israel Discovers Third Massive Natural Gas Field ‘Royee’

Israel announced on Sunday the discovery of a major offshore gas field, the third to be located in its waters in the past five years, augmenting its newly acquired status as an energy power. The new field, some 90 miles off Israel’s coast in the eastern Mediterranean, holds at least 3.2 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of gas, according to a 3D […]

Depletion of Kirkuk oil feared

Kirkuk University experts expressed fears of the depletion of the northern oil and the dangers of reducing oil prices. During a scientific conference held at the University, experts urged for studies that will calculate the storage of Kirkuk oil wells and the produced quantities. On 30 November, 2014, Premier Haidar al-Ibadi stated that experts warned […]

Iran discovers huge gas reserve in Persian Gulf

A huge natural gas reserve has been discovered in south of Iran, Managing Director of the National Iranian Oil Company’s (NIOC) Exploration Department Hormoz Qalavand has announced on Sunday. “Drilling the exploration oil wells has commenced in order to estimate the volume of this new gas reserve,” said Hormoz Qalavand. Although the drop in oil […]

World Proved Oil Reserves, Fact or Fiction

The EIA publishes Annually a list of World Proved Reserves of Crude Oil. Though all charts in this post use the EIA data, BP, the IEA and virtually every other reporting agency in the world uses basically the same data. It is my contention that this data is misleading and totally meaningless. This is especially […]

Peak Oil in America?

Yes! During my 14-year run in the institutional research and trading business in Boston, the finest analyst with whom I worked was oil analyst Dave Hammer. Since 1990 Dave has been the managing partner of Hammer Asset Management. We stay in touch to this day. Yesterday I asked Dave about my concern that shale production […]

Abiogenic Oil, Is It The End Of Peak Oil Fears?

Oil.  Some of the everyday uses are obvious.  We use oil as fuel for heating and transportation, we make plastics and textiles from oil, and many common medications such as A.S.A. are also made from petroleum.  The dependency on oil by modern society is likely understood only to a small degree by many of us.  […]

The Water Crisis Hoax: “Peak Water” – The New “Peak Oil” Myth

The Primary Water Institute – More Scientific Evidence That Water Is Renewable. Following on from the discovery that the earth creates oil in an ongoing process that does not take billions of years, it appears that the same is also true for water. Click here to view a larger version of this diagram in a […]

How Much Oil is Left?

How Much Oil is Left? [This is a complex question, because the quality of the oil matters.  We’ve gotten the good stuff, the light, easy oil. Much of the remaining oil is deep, nasty-gunky stuff, in arctic and other remote areas, and will take a lot more energy to produce and refine] Ron Patterson. July […]

Gulf of Mexico oil production fades

Energy consultant group Wood Mackenzie said it expects U.S. Gulf of Mexico oil production to enter a period of decline after peak output is reached in 2016. New fields — Heidelberg and Jack/St. Malo — should boost output from the Gulf of Mexico with 115,000 barrels of oil equivalent in new production by 2016. Overall […]

China Unlikely to Become Shale Gas Superpower

China is estimated to hold the largest technically recoverable shale gas reserves globally, yet extracting it is too complicated and costly to replicate the US shale gas revolution. China, the largest energy consumer in the world, hopes to become less dependent on energy imports. However, Beijing needs to increase its domestic volumes of energy resources […]

Is North Sea oil exploration nearing its expiry date?

Download podcast The oil field which helped kick-start the North Sea oil boom in the 1970s now looks set to be approaching the end of its useful life.  Anglo-Dutch energy company, Royal Dutch Shell, has announced that it will close two of its three remaining platforms this weekend, while the third will be decommissioned in […]

Proven reserves of failed predictions: The debate over peak oil

This year, a prediction that was posited 11 years ago was disproven.  It was not as though this were some random prediction either:  this was the International Energy Agency’s official prognostication for Peak Oil.  Set in 2003, it has been false ever since.  Each year the world’s proven oil reverses expanded and 2014 was no […]

Peak Oil: A Real Threat to Society?

When oil was first discovered in the U.S., life changed for every single American. Commercial and civilian use for petroleum skyrocketed, as U.S. production of different materials and products soared. During this time, some geologists firmly believed that oil would never deplete. Furthermore, they figured the U.S. was not the only country with petroleum and others must […]

Chevron Announces Oil Discovery in Deepwater U.S. Gulf of Mexico

Chevron Corporation (NYSE: CVX) today announced a new oil discovery at the Guadalupe prospect in the deepwater U.S. Gulf of Mexico. The Keathley Canyon Block 10 Well No. 1 encountered significant oil pay in the Lower Tertiary Wilcox Sands. The well is located approximately 180 miles off the Louisiana coast in 3,992 feet of water […]

Increasing Oil Reserves and Peak Oil

In public lectures that I give about global energy, I often note that since the writing of A Cubic Mile of Oil the global reserves of oil have increased, not decreased, despite the fact that in the intervening time (i.e., between 2007 and 2013) the world has consumed about 7.5 cmo. In this post I […]

fundaments of oil and gas accounting

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For A Few Trillion Barrels More

Figure 1 The history of UK Offshore Field discoveries according to this UK government source. Three main discovery cycles are evident, the third centred on 2007 riding on the back of rising oil prices. The UK is now at a discovery rate cycle low not witnessed since 1968. In recent commentary the highly respected Professor Alex Kemp of the […]

HSBC Economist Says Weve Got Just 50 Years of Oil Left

  TreeHugger has a post on a rare mention of peak oil in the mainstream media – HSBC Economist Says Weve Got Just 50 Years of Oil Left. Now if youve even gotten a small bit of knowledge about the state of the worlds oil reserves and the concept of peak oil, the statement that […]

Peak oil is here: the view from Barbastro

Antonio Turiel, well known for his blog “the oil crash“, speaks at the international meeting “Beyond Peak Oil” organized in Barbastro by UNED. It looks like we are staring straight at the peak’s ugly face. When I started working on peak oil, around 2001, it was an intellectual game that I played with others interested […]

Energy Balance: Is Peak Oil Now a Phantom?

While this edited article of mine (on page 4) was published in The Professional Engineer a while ago, I have only just discovered its existencehttp://www.professionalengineers-uk.org/pdfs/newsletters/ProEngSpr13-issue79.pdf!I remember being asked to write a piece for them, by someone in the audience at a talk that I gave in Guildford a while back on “What happens When the […]

Why is the Arctic at the Center of World Politics?

News coverage of the Arctic has been steadily growing in tandem with the rising importance of the region in recent years. The focus of international politics often tends to revolve around energy security within the context of a global scramble for resources to keep individual countries’ economic growth engines humming. In view of the possibilities […]

North Sea Discovery Contains 16M Barrels

Junior explorer Enegi Oil reported Thursday that new information acquired about Block 22/12b in the central North Sea, containing the Phoenix discovery, indicates that the field is likely to contain oil in place of at least 16 million barrels. Details of the well, including logs and reports, were made available in August 2014 – four […]

We’re Sitting on 10 Billion Barrels of Oil! OK, Two

Lee Tillman, chief executive officer of Marathon Oil Corp., told investors last month that the company was potentially sitting on the equivalent of 4.3 billion barrels in its U.S. shale acreage. That number was 5.5 times higher than the proved reserves Marathon reported to federal regulators. Such discrepancies are rife in the U.S. shale industry. […]

EIA’s International Energy Statistics

The EIA updated their International Energy Statistics on Monday September 29. However there was an error in their data which I caught right away. They had Kazakhstan increasing C+C production by 856,000 barrels per day. Above is their C+C data, January through June. I emailed Patrica Smith, the EIA employee who posts these stats. She emailed […]

ExxonMobil finds oil in the Russian Arctic

ExxonMobil and its Russian partner reportedly have found oil in an Arctic well where drilling was to have stopped today but for a US extension granted to prevent a possible environmental accident The oil was found at Universitetskaya, a 7,700-foot well in the Kara Sea that ExxonMobil’s partner, Rosneft, believes holds about 9 billion barrels of oil. The find […]

Africa’s oil and gas potential: Boom or hype?

Africa’s oil and gas potential will grow significantly over the next two decades, driven by population growth, urbanization and the emergence of a wealthier middle class on the continent. Six of the top 10 global discoveries in the oil and gas sector in 2013 were made in Africa, with more than 500 companies currently exploring […]

China discovers major gas field in South China Sea

China has discovered a major natural gas field in the South China Sea. It is the country’s first independent deep-sea discovery. CCTV’s  Han Peng reports. China’s deep water oil rig 981 is anchored in the South China Sea and has just discovered a major gas field. This newly discovered field contains the energy equivalent of […]

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