Peak Oil: Not Just for Conspiracy Theorists Anymore

I understand why people don’t listen to wild-eyed conspiracy theorists about the coming calamity of peak oil. Instead, they go to recognized experts like Daniel Yergin (author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power), who tells them that everything is OK and the black gold will keep pumping for many decades […]

OPEC won’t dare to disturb the universe

To borrow from T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, why would OPEC bother to “dare disturb the universe”? The monthly Platts survey pegged total output from OPEC’s 12 members at 29.11 million b/d in August. OPEC’s own estimate, derived from secondary sources, is 29.147 million b/d. Both the Platts and OPEC estimates […]

Water: Canada’s most valuable resource

Canadians will never go thirsty. With over one million lakes, including part ownership of the Great Lakes, and massive ice fields, Canada is home to nearly nine per cent of the world’s supply of fresh water. But with a population of less than one per cent of the world’s total, Canada has a lot of […]

What peak oil? Why an oil glut is ahead

In May, less than a month after the blowout of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, a key milestone was achieved with little notice: Total U.S. supplies of petroleum and products refined from it (including the Strategic Petroleum Reserve) surpassed 1.8 billion barrels, reaching the highest level in the last 20 […]

Mexican drug cartels cripple Pemex operations in basin

LA Times The kidnappings of five petroleum company workers along with 30 others have terrorized the oil community, paralyzing segments of the business. Months later, families have still heard nothing. Reporting from Reynosa, Mexico — The meandering network of pipes, wells and tankers belonging to the gigantic state oil company Pemex have long been an […]

Unconventional gas resources changing more than markets

The market changes become more obvious every day. Resource potential is a diminishing concern. The main driver of supply is drilling economics. Only a few years ago, the dominant assumptions were that operators had to drill feverishly just to hold production steady and that LNG imports had to expand to meet whatever demand growth occurred. […]

Grist: Latest Gulf oil well explosion, but what does it say about offshore drilling?

f we hadn’t spent the summer watching crude gush into the Gulf, no one outside the industry would have noticed or cared much about Thursday’s explosion on a Mariner Energy oil platform.  No serious injuries, no spreading slick. But everyone did notice, and it reminded us that no matter how much BP and the rest of […]

WSJ: Oil Price Ignores Long-Term Supply Worries

By Angus Mcdowall You could be excused for seeing a grim metaphor for the death of the oil age in the scenes of destruction visited on the U.S. Gulf coast this summer. However, production from the ocean floor is growing more quickly than from any other type of reserve and is supposed to allay concerns […]

PeakOil.com Weekly Supply Report

27-Aug Unleaded Forecast / Actual Imports 1.10 /1.14 Production 9.61 /9.62 Products Supplied 9.35 /9.39 Demand 10.42 /10.79 Inventory Change 2.05 /-0.20 I had to post the validation of my little unleaded forecast above, which showed that I was within .05 on all of the sub-forecasts, but 2 million barrels of unleaded appeared from nowhere […]

TOD: A Summary of Adam Brandt’s “Review of Mathematical Models of Future Oil Supply”

Dr. Adam Brandt of Stanford University’s Department of Energy Resources Engineering sent us a copy of a paper he wrote called Review of mathematical models of future oil supply: Historical overview and synthesizing critique. There seem to be quite a few things of interest, so I have summarized the paper, since the author did not have […]

NYT: Risk-Taking Rises as Oil Rigs in Gulf Drill Deeper

In a remote reach of the Gulf of Mexico, nearly 200 miles from shore, a floating oil platform thrusts its tentacles deep into the ocean like a giant steel octopus. The $3 billion rig, called Perdido, can pump oil from dozens of wells nearly two miles under the sea while simultaneously drilling new ones. It is part […]

‘Central banks, governments can’t print barrels of oil…’

Recent discoveries of shale gas have given the world much hope. But not everybody is optimistic. “Shale gas is expensive to produce and the current price of gas is not high enough to warrant profitable shale gas production…The hydraulic fracturing process used to extract the gas is extremely polluting and devastating for the environment.Although the […]

Plotting the coming oil shock

Peak Generation A study based on the Hubbert model of peak oil suggests a coming global oil shock may begin as early as 2014 – which ties in with the timeline suggested in a variety of other reports and statements. Peak oil, the concept that geological constraints dictate a time must come when oil production […]

PetroChina Vows Global Expansion as Price Controls Curb Profit

PetroChina Co., Asia’s biggest company by market value, pledged to step up acquisitions and boost cooperation with global oil companies after profit growth slumped because of state controls on fuel prices at home. “PetroChina will continue to expand globally,” President Zhou Jiping said at an earnings briefing in Hong Kong yesterday. “We will boost profitability at […]

BP Declines to Participate in Greenland Oil Licensing Round

BP Plc, the energy company responsible for the biggest oil spill in U.S. history in the Gulf of Mexico, said it won’t seek exploration licenses in Greenland for the time being. “After doing the first stages of investigation, we decided not to compete,” BP spokesman Robert Wine said in a telephone interview today. He declined to […]

Peak oil: two words to worry about

The crisis would be so severe, we wouldn’t be able to run our tractors, heat our homes or drive our cars. As if you don’t have enough to worry about, add two more words to your list: peak oil. Forget climate change -peak oil is the biggest problem on the human horizon according to some. […]

Rigzone: Natural Gas, Other Production Sources Rise as Oil Declines

Overall, U.S. primary energy production in 2009 fell .6 percent to 73.0 quadrillion Btu, down from the record high of 73.4 quadrillion Btu the previous year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Annual Energy Review 2009. The U.S. energy production mix from 1989 to 2009 shifted as natural gas production, coal, nuclear and […]

Sky News: Oil Firms ‘Will Overcome Arctic Challenges’

Despite hostile conditions and intense environmental opposition, the Arctic is set to become a key global oil supplier as demand for fossil fuels continues to rise, analysts have said. The region’s role in meeting future energy needs has been highlighted once again with news that Edinbugh-based Cairn Energy had found “early indications of a working […]

Major reports point to oil supply turmoil and price volatility

Peak Generation Blog MONDAY, AUGUST 23, 2010 Major energy reports published this year are pointing to a significant rise in the price of oil due to supply constraints sometime over the next three years – the only disagreement is how soon. So far 2010 has seen three international reports considering the future of oil production, […]

Guardian: Peak oil alarm revealed by secret official talks

Behind government dismissals of ‘alarmist’ fears there is growing concern over critical future energy supplies peculation that government ministers are far more concerned about a future supply crunch than they have admitted has been fuelled by the revelation that they are canvassing views from industry and the scientific community about “peak oil“. The Department of Energy […]

Global Coal Supplies: It Might Be Worse Than Anyone Thinks

A new study on global coal supplies suggests a worldwide peak in production from existing fields in 2011. Claims that the world has 200 to 400 years of coal left at current rates of consumption have blinded policymakers and the public. The claims are based on two questionable notions: 1) That official coal reserve estimates […]

NPR: Hungry For Oil: Feeding America’s Expensive Habit

Every day the United States goes through another 20 million barrels of oil. Finding enough crude to supply the country’s oil habit is difficult because much of the oil that’s easy to get to is gone. Now companies are extracting oil in places that are expensive to drill and raise concerns about safety and the […]

TOD-EU: Will OPEC Spare Capacity Disappear in 2011?

In this post I present an analysis of how OPEC oil supplies have responded to changes in crude oil prices during the last 10 years. My objective was to estimate OPEC’s probable marketable crude oil capacities as of May 2010, based on responses of OPEC oil supplies to price changes. This approach suggests that as […]

Atlantic: Why OPEC Doesn’t Mind Low Oil Prices

When most people think of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (“OPEC”), they think of a cartel that tries to keep oil prices artificially high so that its members can continue to reap huge profits. For a few years now, however, oil prices have been relatively low due to lackluster demand caused by the recession in the […]

Bloomberg: Goldman says oil demand may have exceeded supply

Global crude oil demand may have exceeded supply in the past two months as inventories stored on tankers fell to an 18-month low, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said. “Now that floating storage has dropped to its lowest levels in over 18 months, we expect to experience declining onshore inventories in coming months,” Goldman Sachs analysts […]

Business Insider: Living with oil demand – and offshore drilling

Potential future costs will make the costly production process even costlier and oil pricier By G PANICKER THE worst oil spill in US history would have set oil prices afire if it had happened two years ago. The market then, fretting over long-term scarcity of oil, was red-hot. Now, US crude prices are still about […]

Peak Generation: ‘cheap oil is over’ as demand approaches new record

SUNDAY, AUGUST 15, 2010 Matthew Wild The International Energy Agency (IEA) is forecasting world oil demand will set a new record next year when is smashes through 2008’s pre-recession high – and warning that the “era of cheap oil is over.” According to the IEA’s latest Oil Market Report, published August 11, global demand will […]

Financial Times: IEA warns of Gulf spill effect on new oil supplies

BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has placed the ability of the industry to find important new oil supplies on “a knife-edge,” the International Energy Agency, the rich country’s watchdog, warned on Wednesday. “Macondo also places the ability of the industry to access important new reserves on a knife edge. Some 30 per […]

O&G Reserves Grow Despite Upstream Spending Decline

Rigzone All categories of upstream spending declined in 2009 and total costs incurred fell 47 percent from $139.8 billion in 2008 to $73.4 billion in 2009, Ernst & Young reported in its U.S. E&P Benchmark study of the exploration and production results of 50 companies from 2005 to 2009. Spending was impacted by the declines […]

Oil reserves are plentiful, says Aramco chief

International Business Times The head of Saudi Aramco has brushed aside ‘peak oil’ concerns, saying the world has plentiful supply of oil and gas, with a vast quantity of known reserves yet to be tapped and additional resources still to be discovered. Speaking at the Oxford Energy Forum, Saudi Aramco President and CEO Khalid A. […]

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