At the University of Tennessee, switchgrass is all the buzz - a plant that's farmer & environment-friendly, and a cheap alternative to high-priced corn for making ethanol. Switchgrass Science is a segment from Partners Video Magazine's latest episode, Fueling America.
A study published in an Australian newspaper looks into the effect of rising oil prices in Sydney. They showed a rather obvious result - that those who live in the suburbs have higher fuel costs than those who live in city centers. If the Australian suburbs are anywhere near as badly laid out as American suburbs, they are arranged to the convenience of the all-important car, there is little allowance for walkability, and as a result people are driving everywhere.
The article places fuel costs as a percentage of income and due to rising fuel costs they identify suburban residents as beginning to spend 6% or more of their income on fuel. Astonishing!
This rising percentage for fuel cost will clearly lead these people to agitate, or to look for solutions.
The OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin provides much grist for exploring the question: "So is Saudi production about to nosedive"? If Saudi production were to nosedive it would indicate the world oil peak having been reached.
Maybe Saudi production nosedived in late 2005. Maybe the Saudi's are voluntarily holding back production so they can manipulate the market.
Summary
1. Cross checking OPEC production and rig count data with International Energy Agency (IEA) and Baker Hughes data shows excellent agreement suggesting there is no reason to doubt the reliability of the OPEC data source.
2. In 2005, Saudi Arabia had 1923 producing wells that on average produced 5740 barrels oil per day per well. This is astonishing high well productivity for an area that has been producing oil for over 50 years.
3. The average well productivity has drifted down from just above 6000 bpd in 1991 to just below 6000 bpd in 2005 (Figure 1). There is no sign of a looming productivity crisis in these data and it would appear that increasing production may be achieved quite simply by drilling more wells.
4. The data provide insight into Saudi Aramco reservoir and resource management in relation to their roll as swing producer. In the past, production has been reduced by retiring production wells and raised again by bringing wells out of retirement. All the while, Aramco have a rolling program of drilling new wells thereby increasing the total number of wells that are available for production.
5. In my post of 7th March I suggested that the most likely explanation for falling Saudi production since April 2006 was voluntary restraint executed through a program of resting wells with high water cut or low pressure. The data presented here contain no evidence of a pending production crisis and voluntary restraint is still considered to be the most likely explanation for recent falls in Saudi production.
"It used to be that only environmentalists and paranoids warned about running out of oil." But times are changing and there is more and more awareness of the peak oil phenomenon. The ever-rising price of oil and other events are making it abundantly clear that the oil industry is in crisis. "With global demand inexorably rising, a limited supply will bring higher, more volatile prices and eventually shortages that could provoke -- to quote the title of the must-see peak oil documentary -- the end of suburbia."
They quote eminent insider James Schlesinger, who has served as chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, head of the CIA, Defense Secretary, Energy Secretary and adviser to countless oil companies, as saying "It's no longer the case that we have a few voices crying in the wilderness. The battle is over. The peakists have won." Okay, a thoroughly entrenched insider such as Schlesinger to say such a thing is an indication of how far we have come. Similarly, they also quote Jeroen van der Veer, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell as saying "After 2015, easily accessible supplies of oil and gas probably will no longer keep up with demand."
The United States with its addiction to oil and it's car-centric infrastructure is very vulnerable to this problem.
Gas 2.0 digs into the viscous world of biofuels and the fast-paced transit arena, exploring the technologies and substances that will power our transportation future.
Gas 2.0 is fueling the revolution, offering insight, analysis, resources, and personal experiences rooted in one unifying goal: to move beyond petroleum as a fuel source.
Organic LED's are an up-and-coming technology which has a lot of promise as both a computer/TV display and as lighting. OLED's are derived from organic style technology, and offer very efficient lighting. This particular product is an OLED light for lighting rooms.
In the 1970's there was a fake oil crisis which caught everybody's attention. At least for awhile, until the easily distracted Americans forgot and Reagan was elected, and we went back to driving SUV's as if there were no limit to the oil.
NY Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a column delving into the current high oil prices to ponder whether the current situation is another fake oil crisis. He seems to think it isn't a fake crisis. The clue is that it isn't acting like a situation where commodity speculators are forcing the price upward. Therefore, he concludes, this is a real shortage of some sort.
Such as... peak oil. The peak oil situation says we will reach a point where oil supplies cannot in any way keep up with rising demand, and Economics 101 states such a situation inevitably means higher prices.
An energy crisis is running amok right now. A taste of the crisis is: the ever-climbing price of oil and gasoline, truckers being forced to not truck stuff around, airlines going out of business or merging, food riots around the world, etc.
...Energy of all sorts was once hugely abundant, making possible the worldwide economic expansion of the past six decades. This expansion benefited the United States above all - along with its "First World" allies in Europe and the Pacific. ... China and India...participate in...industrializing their economies...This, in turn, has led to an unprecedented spurt in global energy consumption - a 47% rise in the past 20 years alone, according to the US Department of Energy (DoE). ... The combination of rising demand, the emergence of powerful new energy consumers, and the contraction of the global energy supply is demolishing the energy-abundant world we are familiar with and creating in its place a new world order. Think of it as rising powers/shrinking planet.
The article goes on to describe a "new world order" dictated by the changing energy supply dynamics.
A fierce competition for dwindling resources, which are identified as "oil, natural gas, coal and uranium". Coupled with that is a shift in global power to the countries who are rich in resources, which are identified as "Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela".
If current trends continue as they are, China is destined to overtake the United States in 2025 as the worlds leading consumer of "energy". However the article also identifies China as one of the "energy poor" countries and I think it's doubtful the trends will continue as they are. As the article says elsewhere, there is a shift to countries rich in resources and China is poor in energy resources while rich in others.
Several of the developing countries are constructing their own oil and natural gas companies as a way to compete with those companies based in Western countries. This includes Sinopec which has established a strategic alliance with Saudi Aramco. Likewise China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) will collaborate with Gazprom to build pipelines and deliver Russian gas to China. Several of these state-owned firms are now set to collaborate with Petroleos de Venezuela SA in developing the extra-heavy crude of the Orinoco belt once controlled by Chevron.
The oil peak is coming. The US DoE claims that world oil demand, expected to reach 117.6 million barrels per day in 2030 but it's not clear where that oil will come from. Instead industry experts are quoted saying even 100 million barrels per day is extremely optimistic.
...the authors of the Medium-Term Oil Market Report, published in July 2007 by the International Energy Agency, an affiliate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, concluded that world oil output might hit 96 million barrels per day by 2012, but was unlikely to go much beyond that as a dearth of new discoveries made future growth impossible....
Alternative energy sources such as wind or solar power are simply not being developed quickly enough.
...According to the DoE, renewable fuels, including wind, solar and hydropower (along with "traditional" fuels like firewood and dung), supplied but 7.4% of global energy in 2004; biofuels added another 0.3%. Meanwhile, fossil fuels - oil, coal and natural gas - supplied 86% of world energy, nuclear power another 6%. Based on current rates of development and investment, the DoE offers the following dismal projection: In 2030, fossil fuels will still account for exactly the same share of world energy as in 2004. The expected increase in renewables and biofuels is so slight - a mere 8.1% - as to be virtually meaningless.
In global warming terms, the implications are nothing short of catastrophic: Rising reliance on coal (especially in China, India and the United States) means that global emissions of carbon dioxide are projected to rise by 59% over the next quarter-century, from 26.9 billion metric tons to 42.9 billion tons. The meaning of this is simple. If these figures hold, there is no hope of averting the worst effects of climate change. ...
But rather than invest in "alternate" technologies
...the major energy firms (backed by lavish US government subsidies and tax breaks) are putting their mega-windfall profits from rising energy prices into vastly expensive (and environmentally questionable) schemes to extract oil and gas from Alaska and the Arctic, or to drill in the deep and difficult waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. ...
An energy crisis is running amok right now. A taste of the crisis is: the ever-climbing price of oil and gasoline, truckers being forced to not truck stuff around, airlines going out of business or merging, food riots around the world, etc.
...Energy of all sorts was once hugely abundant, making possible the worldwide economic expansion of the past six decades. This expansion benefited the United States above all - along with its "First World" allies in Europe and the Pacific. ... China and India...participate in...industrializing their economies...This, in turn, has led to an unprecedented spurt in global energy consumption - a 47% rise in the past 20 years alone, according to the US Department of Energy (DoE). ... The combination of rising demand, the emergence of powerful new energy consumers, and the contraction of the global energy supply is demolishing the energy-abundant world we are familiar with and creating in its place a new world order. Think of it as rising powers/shrinking planet.
The article goes on to describe a "new world order" dictated by the changing energy supply dynamics.
A fierce competition for dwindling resources, which are identified as "oil, natural gas, coal and uranium". Coupled with that is a shift in global power to the countries who are rich in resources, which are identified as "Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela".
If current trends continue as they are, China is destined to overtake the United States in 2025 as the worlds leading consumer of "energy". However the article also identifies China as one of the "energy poor" countries and I think it's doubtful the trends will continue as they are. As the article says elsewhere, there is a shift to countries rich in resources and China is poor in energy resources while rich in others.
Several of the developing countries are constructing their own oil and natural gas companies as a way to compete with those companies based in Western countries. This includes Sinopec which has established a strategic alliance with Saudi Aramco. Likewise China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) will collaborate with Gazprom to build pipelines and deliver Russian gas to China. Several of these state-owned firms are now set to collaborate with Petroleos de Venezuela SA in developing the extra-heavy crude of the Orinoco belt once controlled by Chevron.
The oil peak is coming. The US DoE claims that world oil demand, expected to reach 117.6 million barrels per day in 2030 but it's not clear where that oil will come from. Instead industry experts are quoted saying even 100 million barrels per day is extremely optimistic.
...the authors of the Medium-Term Oil Market Report, published in July 2007 by the International Energy Agency, an affiliate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, concluded that world oil output might hit 96 million barrels per day by 2012, but was unlikely to go much beyond that as a dearth of new discoveries made future growth impossible....
Alternative energy sources such as wind or solar power are simply not being developed quickly enough.
...According to the DoE, renewable fuels, including wind, solar and hydropower (along with "traditional" fuels like firewood and dung), supplied but 7.4% of global energy in 2004; biofuels added another 0.3%. Meanwhile, fossil fuels - oil, coal and natural gas - supplied 86% of world energy, nuclear power another 6%. Based on current rates of development and investment, the DoE offers the following dismal projection: In 2030, fossil fuels will still account for exactly the same share of world energy as in 2004. The expected increase in renewables and biofuels is so slight - a mere 8.1% - as to be virtually meaningless.
In global warming terms, the implications are nothing short of catastrophic: Rising reliance on coal (especially in China, India and the United States) means that global emissions of carbon dioxide are projected to rise by 59% over the next quarter-century, from 26.9 billion metric tons to 42.9 billion tons. The meaning of this is simple. If these figures hold, there is no hope of averting the worst effects of climate change. ...
But rather than invest in "alternate" technologies
...the major energy firms (backed by lavish US government subsidies and tax breaks) are putting their mega-windfall profits from rising energy prices into vastly expensive (and environmentally questionable) schemes to extract oil and gas from Alaska and the Arctic, or to drill in the deep and difficult waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. ...
