Is peak oil a non-event?

Ken Parish at Club Troppo draws attention to a remarkable new report that confounds the conventional wisdom on peak oil and has important implications for cities. It’s published by Harvard University’s Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs. It concludes that oil supply capacity is growing worldwide at such an unprecedented level, it might outpace […]

Tech Talk – Saudi Arabia then and now

The latest OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report (MOMR) foresees that demand for OPEC crude oil will decline over the next year by about 300 kbd. This is largely in anticipation of additional production from elsewhere: Non-OPEC supply is forecast to increase by 0.7 mb/d in 2012, supported by the anticipated growth from North America, Latin […]

Will the US export fracking to the rest of the world?

Quick, name the most significant American innovation of the past ten years. How about hydraulic fracturing? Okay, that’s not an entirely new invention. As T. Boone Pickens has pointed out, people have been using pressurized fluid to split open rocks underground since the 1940s. But it wasn’t until very recently that the U.S. natural gas industry, […]

East Africa: the Next Major Oil and Gas Region?

The recently-ended takeover battle between Royal Dutch Shell and Thai state-owned exploration and production firm PTT Exploration and Production (PTTEP) for Mozambique-focused Cove Energy has served to highlight the growing interest that the energy industry has in East Africa. With East Africa having been ignored for a very long time by oil and gas majors, […]

The oil industry’s lure of the deep (waters)

If you thought 2008 was a heyday for deepwater drilling, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. At least that’s the message suggested by the first two drillers, Noble Corporation and Diamond Offshore, that reported second-quarter earnings this week. While earnings were healthy, it was the commentary by the drillers’ managers that made Wall Street sit up and […]

China starts oil field operation in southern Iraq

Iraq and China’s National Petroleum Corporation jointly launched the inauguration ceremony for the Halfaya oil field in the southern Maysan province on Wednesday. Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Hussein Al-Shahristani, the Oil Minister Abdul Kareem Luaibi and the Chinese ambassador Ni Jian participated in the ceremony. The field will produce 70,000 barrels of oil a day […]

Silly Dictator Story #10: Iran’s Oil Output Apparently At Record Levels

By most accounts, sanctions have severely affected Iranian oil output. But that’s not the case if you ask one of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s most senior advisers. Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani, director of the Office of the Supreme Leader, told a group of clergymen and scholars in Gilan Province that Iran “is currently producing between […]

Maugeri on peak oil

Carpe Diem, Reuters, FTalphaville, and WhaleOil are among those calling attention to a new paper by Leonardo Maugeri, senior manager for the Italian oil company Eni, and Senior Fellow at Harvard University, which concluded: Contrary to what most people believe, oil supply capacity is growing worldwide at such an unprecedented level that it might outpace […]

The Peak Oil Crisis: Technology Races Depletion

Few would argue with the proposition that within the next 20 or 30 years our current sources of fossil fuels and other somewhat substitutable liquids will be only a fraction of the 90 or so million barrels a day (b/d) that we are current consuming. Long before then however, fossil fuels are likely to become […]

Tight Oil could not Render OPEC Irrelevant

Steve Levine has a blog post discussing the idea that the “unfolding new age of fossil fuel abundance” will have profound effects on various things, including OPEC: With prices dropping and competing supplies flowing from numerous new producers, OPEC will lose much relative influence, and may simply cease to be a pivotal economic player. “OPEC […]

Iraq signs gas contract with Pakistan Petroleum

Iraq signed an initial gas exploration contract with Pakistan Petroleum (PPL.KA) on Sunday as part of its push to attract more foreign investment to develop its energy sector following years of war and sanctions. The contract gives the Pakistani company the right to explore gas block 8 in Diyala and Wasit provinces in eastern Iraq, […]

Peak Oil: One More Dose Of Crude Oil Reality

One of the key deficiencies of “unconventional” fuels is their low energy return on investment relative to conventional fuels. Many analysts have ignored this factor because investment decisions are made on the basis of the financial, not energy, return on investment. But a growing literature suggests that the two are intimately related…. The financial return […]

Operations begin at oil pipeline bypassing strait of hormuz

The United Arab Emirates on Sunday inaugurated a much-anticipated overland oil pipeline that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz, giving the OPEC member insurance against Iranian threats to block the strategic waterway. The 380-kilometer (236-mile) Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline snakes across western desert dunes and over the craggy Hajar mountains to the city of Fujairah […]

Miners Weather The Slow Burn Of Coal’s Demis

At some point today, you will probably flip on a light switch. That simple action connects you to the oldest and most plentiful source of American electricity: coal. Since the early 1880s — when Edison and Tesla pioneered the distribution of electrical power into our homes — most of that power has come from the […]

Tech Talk – Saudi Arabia and what lies ahead

Saudi Aramco has stated that it designs the well layouts and extraction patterns from its oil fields so that they effectively decline at a rate of 2% per year.* If one divides 100 by 2 it yields 50. If one subtracts 50 from 2012, one gets the year 1962. Even to those with poor math […]

Plan to Drill for Cuban Oil Faces Delay

A Russian state oil company will delay drilling its first exploratory well off the northern coast of Cuba, about 180 miles from Florida, after apparently struggling to find a suitable drilling rig that would not violate U.S. sanctions. Cuba produces little oil now, but petroleum experts say the country’s northern coastal waters could hold reserves, […]

OPEC’s motto: Shhhhh! Don’t mention the “S” word

OPEC published its latest monthly oil market report on July 11. Anyone reading it might expect to find some mention of the fact that one of its members, Iran, is now under two sets of sanctions which threaten not only its oil exports but also, ultimately, the volume of crude it produces. But there was no […]

OPEC says Liquid Fuel Down Slightly

The graph is above.  I’m sure the decline is not in any way statistically significant, but still it reinforces the impression that growth in the liquid fuel supply stopped in January of this year.  It’s been essentially flat since then.  With prices not rising, that suggests a weak global economy. The IEA will release the […]

Saudi Arabia to remain biggest producer of oil

Saudi Arabia, the biggest oil producer in the world with a proven reserve of 264 billion barrels, could continue oil supplies for the next 80 years at the current production levels, the Kuwait-based Diplomatic Center for Strategic Studies (DCSS) said in a study. Saudi Arabia retains 38.7 percent of world oil reserves whereas the shares […]

Work starts at 2 Iran’s oil fields to produce 700,000 bpd

A Chinese company has invested $20 billion in Iran’s Yadavaran and Azadegan oil fields, which are projected to produce 700,000 barrels of oil per day when they reach peak capacity, Iranian Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi announced on Sunday. “After 10 to 15 years of negotiations with the Chinese side, agreements were struck for the development […]

Tech Talk – the “best of the rest” in Saudi Arabia

The discussion that swirls over the future of global oil supplies often seems to focus, from the side of those who suggest that there is no problem, on the large volumes of oil that still remain in place around the world. The critical point however is not that this oil exists, but rather the rate […]

Natural gas sets record by matching coal’s output

King Coal is meeting its match: natural gas. Power plants fired by natural gas have set a new record by producing as much electricity in the United States as those run by coal, long the nation’s dominant power producer. Preliminary data for April show that natural gas plants generated the same share of U.S. electricity […]

Half of Libya’s oil exports hit by protests

Around half of Libya’s oil exporting capacity has been shut down and production reduced by about 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) because of protests by groups demanding greater autonomy for eastern Libya, shippers and officials said on Friday. At least three major oil exporting terminals were closed the previous evening and by Friday the first […]

North Sea Production Falls; Decline Set to Continue

The North Sea oil and gas industry was last year hit by its biggest ever fall in production with another slide in output forecast for 2012. A further fall would be a blow to the UK government as lower oil and gas production took its toll on industrial output in the first three months of […]

Oil focus shifts to the North Sea

While tensions seem to be easing over Iran after their temper tantrum in the Straits of Hormuz, the oil market now is focused on growing tensions in the North Sea. These tensions do not involve a conflict between countries but a conflict between Norway’s Statoil and Norway’s oil labor union the oil industry association. While […]

Rising Energy Output/Input Ratio for US Oil and Gas

I discovered something interesting while poking around this morning on the website of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (the agency that produces GDP statistics for the United States).  It turns out they have a spreadsheet with estimates of the amount of energy inputs to different industries.  Since they also have estimates of the outputs of […]

In the valley of the shadow of peak oil

In 1956 Texan geochemist Marion King Hubbert [3] made a presentation to the annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute in San Antonio, Texas. King Hubbert (as he was known to many) made a bold prediction, that in every geographical area, from a single oil field to the entire planet, the rate of petroleum production […]

US Crude Production by State

The above chart shows US crude oil production by month from Jan 1981 through April 2012.  I have broken out all the states producing more than 100 kbd (thousand barrels/day) by the end.  The original peak level of the total came in November 1970 at 10.044mbd, but the per-state data doesn’t go back that far […]

Arctic Drilling Gets Serious

Shell made headlines in May when the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) approved its oil response plan for its exploratory program in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Shell awaits drilling permits from the BSEE to start drilling for oil. While waiting for approval, Shell has been testing its new oil spill containment system. […]

Harvard Senior Fellow: Peak Oil Is History

With the publication of his careful study, “Oil: The Next Revolution,” internationally respected economist and senior fellow at Harvard University Leonardo Maugeri has persuasively buried the theory of “peak oil” beneath 75 pages of evidence to the contrary. He wrote: Contrary to what most people believe, oil supply capacity is growing worldwide at such an […]

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