Shale oil

-The heart of India is under attack
-Shale gas blasts open world energy market
-Shale gas numbers may not add up
-It’s a dirty business — the new gold rush that is blackening Canada’s name

The price of oil has more than doubled from its nadir of $30 a barrel earlier this year. To explain the resilience of oil prices in the face of a severe economic slump, the oil optimists have turned to an old standby argument: resource nationalism.

So far in this series of technical talks, I have tried to explain some of the pieces that have to be put together to get crude oil or natural gas out of the ground. I intend to go on with the series in the coming weeks, but thought that today I would put some of the different thoughts that I have talked about recently together. So I am going to talk a little about reserve calculations and production and will use an example to show how the numbers are derived. And again, let me stress that this is a very simplified example. It is also only somewhat fictionalized, as I shall comment at the end.

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.

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.

Richard Heinberg’s new book Blackout tries to demolish current assumptions about the world’s remaining coal endowment: namely, that it is immense beyond belief, barely tapped and will last for centuries to come. Heinberg argues that these assumptions are off-base, misleading and not at all supported by recent studies that suggest global coal production could peak in less than two decades.

'We are fighting for our lives and our dignity'
Heinberg on resource conflicts and the Peru oil standoff
Fighting over oil and water (oil shale)
The coming U.S.-Saudi fight over "energy independence"

A weekly peak oil review, including
-Production and prices
-Iraq
-Detroit
-Briefs

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

A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Production and prices
-Off-shore drilling
-EPA
-Briefs

A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Production and prices
-The Clean Energy & Security Act
-Cuba
-Detroit
-Briefs

Future Scenarios serves as a good introduction to the concept of future energy descent/climate change scenarios.

U.S. Congress Begins Talks On Energy Bill
Let the Clean Energy Revolution Begin
The Climate Change Lobby Explosion
Administration blocks more Bush-era oil shale development leases

This content is no longer available. It was a pre-publication draft of a section of "Energy Limits to Growth," a report that will be published in expanded form by Post Carbon Institute and International Forum on globalization in May.

Groups soliciting funds to buy BLM leases (student disrupts auction)
Coal front group sets up dirty ‘blogger brigade’
Korea oil bunker