Stark choices face us on energy use
Human nature is such that we tend to wait for a crisis to happen before we react. However, as the current series of articles on the looming energy crisis highlight, we do so at our peril.
Human nature is such that we tend to wait for a crisis to happen before we react. However, as the current series of articles on the looming energy crisis highlight, we do so at our peril.
Powerdown is a brilliant analysis of the options available to a civilization facing resource depletion, biosphere collapse, and financial insolvency.
Once production peaks then it can’t meet demand and then prices will rise and it will be the equivalent of the oil shock in the 1970s. That will be a huge boost to renewables.
The data I am being told by engineers who have worked on Ghawar suggests that this decade will see it’s peak. As Ghawar goes, so goes the world.
In best-case scenarios, like Exxon Mobil, production is relatively flat. Many more energy companies are pumping less oil than they were a year ago.
The oil majors are quietly panicking because they cannot find sufficient new projects or fields big enough to make a material difference to companies of their size.
With the end of cheap oil on the horizon, Puerto Rico continues to move toward alternatives, but is it moving fast enough?
There is no other oil producer on earth that can even begin over time to replace a significant short fall in Saudi Arabia’s oil. So if in fact, Saudi Arabia is at their peak production, then so is the world.
Energy demand has become a runaway train. There’s no way we can stop that train until we hit a brick wall.
When oil prices have doubled to $80 and a second Great Depression threatens global political stability, our president will assemble a 9/11-style commission to explain the intelligence and policy failures that led to the crisis. The verdict will be familiar: The stunning blow to the world economy brought about by the sudden, unexpected depletion of fossil fuel should have been anticipated and prevented.
Nigeria’s oil industry – Africa’s largest and the fifth-biggest source of US oil imports – is concerned for its future after a yearlong spree of bloodletting that has killed more than 1 000 people in the Niger Delta.
Beleaguered Russian giant Yukos can continue to produce and sell oil despite an earlier demand to stop output, according to Russian officials.