Energy Bulletin

This chapter explores details behind the phenomenal increase in global crude oil production over the last century and a half and the implications if that trend should be reversed. I document that a key feature of the growth in production has been exploitation of new geographic areas rather than application of better technology to existing sources, and suggest that the end of that era could come soon. The economic dislocations that historically followed temporary oil supply disruptions are reviewed, and the possible implications of that experience for what the transition era could look like are explored.

President Obama exuberantly embraced America’s new oil and gas frontier this week in his State of the Union address. Clearly aiming to steal some Republican election thunder, he pledged to open 75% of potential oil and gas resources, and repeated claims that the US is sitting on enough natural gas to last for 100 years (see insightful commentary on the numbers behind this from Chris Nelder, and more on gas prospects from David Strahan.

Stop wrangling over global warming and instead reduce fossil-fuel use for the sake of the global economy.

That's the message from two scientists, one from the University of Washington and one from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who say in the current issue of the journal Nature (Jan. 26) that the economic pain of a flattening oil supply will trump the environment as a reason to curb the use of fossil fuels.

The "tipping point" for oil supply appears to have occurred around 2005, says James W. Murray, UW professor of oceanography. The commentary concludes: "This will be a decades-long transformation and we need to start immediately. Emphasizing the short-term economic imperative from oil prices must be enough to push governments into action now."

Last March, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami left nearly 20,000 dead or missing and destroyed 125,000 buildings in the Tohoku region of Japan. The two disasters also caused three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to melt down, which released dangerous levels of radiation into surrounding areas and led to national power shortages. Tokyo’s iconic neon signs were switched off as rolling blackouts spread across the country. Faced with the greatest reconstruction task since World War II, Japan is asking difficult questions about the future of its energy supply and just what sort of society should emerge from the ruins.

A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week

The strategy discussed in last week's post--that of walking away from energy-intensive lifestyles before the waning of the age of abundant energy brings them grinding to a halt--is a viable response to the crisis of our age, but it's also a great way to poke a stick at some of the most deeply entrenched of the modern world's dysfunctional habits of thinking. Suggest it in public, for example, and you'll very quickly learn why all that talk about saving the planet has turned out to be empty air: everyone's quite willing to watch someone else make sacrifices for the good of the biosphere, but ask them to make sacrifices themselves and you'll see just how far their love of the planet extends.

-DOE slashes gas estimate for Marcellus Shale
-DOE report projects greater coal production drop
-Obama makes strong call for clean energy — oh, and drilling and fracking too
-Obama sets out 'all-of-the-above' clean energy policy
-Obama's speech and some sober talk about the oil patch

The prominent scientific journal Nature has just published an article that supports what we in the peak oil world have been saying for years.

James Murray of the University of Washington and David King of the University of Oxford say that global oil production peaked in 2005 at about 75 million barrels a day.

The "supply of cheap oil has plateaued," said King. "The geologists know where the source rocks are and where the trap structures are," according to Murray. "If there was a prospect for a new giant oil field, I think it would have been found."

(Excerpts from news articles about the article.)

Here is one more thing for those of us who live in the northeastern U.S. to start worrying about - the refineries that make our gasoline, diesel, heating oil, etc. are dropping like flies.

In today's economy, these refineries are simply losing so much money that their owners who are not major oil companies that make billions from oil production are having put them up for sale or close them down.

-Fossil fuels are sub-prime assets, Bank of England governor warned
-The real beneficiaries of energy subsidies
-Podcast: How Equity and Economics Will Drive Climate and Energy Stories in 2012
-Companies and tax authorities can all benefit if they work together

-Shale Gas a Bridge to More Global Warming
-REPORT: Venting and Leaking of Methane from Shale Gas Development:
Response to Cathles et al.
-Dueling Research: Fracked Shale Gas Worse For Climate Change Than Coal! Or, The Opposite!

With the exception of tidal energy, our focus thus far has been on land-based energy sources. Meanwhile, the ocean absorbs a prodigious fraction of the Sun's incident energy, creating thermal gradients, currents, and waves whipped up by winds. Let's put some scales on the energetics of these sources and see if we may turn to them for help. We've got our three boxes ready: abundant, potent, and niche (puny). Time to do some sorting!

Giving false hope, Obama claimed several times last year that U.S. oil extraction was at an all-time high, when actually it’s in a long-term decline. Whatever people say about the future, at least I hope we can be honest about the past, and put our current position in a long-term perspective. That’s not too much to hope for, is it?

Caring about the air, water, and land that give us life. Exploring ways to ensure Canada’s natural resources serve the national interest. Knowing that sacrificing our environment to a corporate-controlled economy is suicide. If those qualities make us radicals, as federal Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver recently claimed in an open letter, then I and many others will wear the label proudly.

Few debates illustrate the messy nature of North America's energy politics better than the postponement of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Social scientists often cite the handicap that we are not permitted to conduct experiments on humans as an excuse for why social science advances more slowly than the physical sciences. But fracking provides an interesting social experiment playing out right before our eyes. In Pennsylvania, gas and natural resource companies have been sufficiently powerful to prevent passage of a statewide ban on fracking; as a result 8000 permits have been issued and 4000 wells dug since 2008. Just across the Delaware River, New York State has issued a temporary ban on fracking in Marcellus Shale pending release of a study and new regulations by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The issue has become so controversial that the NYSDEC report may now be delayed until 2013.

When your local utility buys more renewable energy to power your lights and computers, what more do you get besides the power?
You get cleaner air, fewer respiratory health problems, and lower health-care costs.
You get local jobs building and maintaining green power plants and a better foothold in the fast-growing, multi-billion dollar global renewable energy industry.
If you use the power to charge the new plug-in electric vehicles now available, you reduce our imports of foreign oil and increase our energy security.
And finally, you reduce the greenhouse gases that are leading to the severe, threatening weather events spurred by global climate change.

Occasionally, the troubled story of Alfred Wegener's theory has been perversely appropriated by climate deniers to claim that they are discriminated by the scientific establishment. But that only shows that climate deniers don't understand how science works.

Mark Twain is reported to have said: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” What most environmentalists think they know for sure is that oil, coal and natural gas are all abundant-so abundant, in fact, that many environmentalists believe they are forced to make a Hobson’s choice of natural gas as a so-called “bridge fuel” to a renewable energy future.

It’s late December and an icy fog cloaks the northeastern state of Uttar Pradesh. Here, far from the cities, smoke rises in dense, choking spirals from meagre wood fires and scantily-clad children shiver against the cold. These are largely farming families, and their mud huts fortified by the occasional brick wall are for the most part devoid of light, heat or clean water. But it is here in Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s largest and poorest states, far away from the country’s straining power grid, that US-born entrepreneurs Nikhil Jaisinghani and Brian Shaad have started to pioneer a wholly different energy system, designed to meet some of the most basic needs of the poorest.