Conventional oil

The Saudis are exploring the opportunity to sell their oil on more transparent exchanges in which they feel they have some logical control over production levels and pricing in relation to world demand, and also be paid in currencies outside the anemic US dollar. Such a mover would be a great influence on all of OPEC. This has crucial implications for the US as it could take oil trading from US exchanges and eventually outside the dollar as the currency of trade.

-Oilwatch Monthly October 2009
-A post-oil world gets less sci-fi by the day
-The Truth About Energy
-Global oil supply: Separating fact from fiction

A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Production and prices
-Another price spike?
-ASPO-USA Conference
-Briefs

Evolution demands short-term thinking focused on individual survival. Most attempts to overcome our evolutionarily hardwired absorption with self are selected against. The Overman is dead, killed by a high-fat diet and unwillingness to exercise. Reflexively, we follow him into the grave.

-The Era of Xtreme Energy
-Cantarell Update 2009: The Peak Oil PosterChild Continues to Plummet
-Finding new oil gets ever more expensive
-Oil Industry Sets a Brisk Pace of New Discoveries
-The Peak Oil Downside Will Be Steeper Than The Upside

Recently, we have had two new articles aiming to put to rest people's fears about peak oil. One is from the New York Times: Oil Industry Sets a Brisk Pace of New Discoveries It talks about the many discoveries this year, and how, if they continue at the pace they have in the first half, they will be the best since 2000. The other is from the October Scientific American, called Squeezing More Oil from the Ground...Its premise seems to be that there are a lot of promising areas that we have not yet explored. When you put this together with advances in drilling and the promises of secondary and tertiary recovery, there is a good chance that oil production will not peak for many years.

-Debate about peak oil is misleading
-Saudi provides realistic outlook on energy future
-OAPEC to spend $133 bn on boosting refinery output
-Abu Dhabi to invest $10 bn on green projects
-UNDP Arab Human Development Report 2009

-Oil Spin
-Oil still has us over a barrel
-Maribynong Peak Oil Contingency Plan

-Study ranks states' vulnerability to oil prices
-‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy
-Opec’s greed will herald the end of the oil age

it's the end of the world as we know it (...and I feel fine) (1)

Probably few saw this meltdown coming. We have come to view human progress as a given, and an ever growing economy and living standard as an entitlement.

If you are planning to withdraw, please tell me where you're going, and send directions. If not, it's time to start thinking about how you and your family or tribe will muddle through the years ahead. One word comes to mind: durability. If that wasn't the first word that came to your mind, I'm not surprised.

The CEO Poll: On black gold
Shell's Willem Schulte says we have enough oil, for now
High oil prices and the end of globalization really?
An Alternative National Energy Security Assessment for Australia

If you’ve been following energy news with a discerning eye, then you already know better than to buy into all the hype about the Canadian tar sands...Far from being a panacea for declining supplies of conventional oil, the sands could...leave Alberta resembling “a third-rate golf course in the Sudan”...The quote comes from Andrew Nikiforuk’s new book Tar Sands, a powerful, eloquent litany of horrors associated with North America’s frenzied dash toward tar sands bitumen.

A weekly roundup of Peak Oil news, including:
-Production and prices
-Natural gas
-Carbon
-Briefs

From the hills of the Deccan Plateau in western India's state of Maharashtra, the world of export fuels is unimaginable. In these hill villages firewood is still the primary fuel. In the hour before the sun goes down over the hills and the temperature drops, women bearing head loads of bundles of light branches head back to their simple homes. What these families have in common with many hundreds of thousands of households in rural India is their continued reliance on wood as fuel, whether for cooking or, as in these windswept hills, for keeping warm.