The Peakist

Shell announced record profits in the first week of February at a press conferences in London. Journalist David Strahan (producer of the seminal BBC Money Programme on ‘peak oil’ theory back in 2000) asked CEO Jeroen van der Veer whether Shell had done any detailed modelling on peak oil. Mr. van der Veer replied that his argument was that the world will not arrive at a peak oil situation. He said that peak oil is correct as applied to regional areas of production but does not apply to the world as a whole. Mr. van Der Veer’s justification for this statement was that an unquantifiable level of reserves lie in unconventional oil, and tellingly, coal. Shell is explicitly stating then that the mitigation strategy in the face of a peak of conventional oil will ultimately lie in coal liquifaction. Jeremy Leggett has argued that “amid the ruins of the old energy modus operandi many will try to turn to coal, and so the extent to which renewable energy grows explosively instead of coal expansion, rather than alongside it, will determine whether economies and ecosystems can survive the global warming threat…’Solarisation’ versus ‘coalification’”. Shell have admitted to a conventional oil peak and have announced a mitigation strategy which bodes ill for the future of climate change.

(more…)

The way we view economic success in the UK has become a fossil-fuelled fantasy - so says Andrew Simmons from the New Economics Foundation (NEF). The fossil fuel industry is a major source of tax revenue for western nations, which is a disincentive to cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The NEF calculates that the oil corporations would be bankrupt if the taxes they paid reflected the social and environmental costs of their emissions. Virtually all conventional economists say economic growth is the answer to third world poverty. Yet the world’s poorest have seen a 73 per cent drop in share of benefits from growth in last decade according to new research from NEF. In the 1990s it took an extra $166 of production and consumption - with all its associated environmental damage - to generate each $1 of poverty reduction. Between 1990 and 2001, just 60 cents of every $100 of extra global income from growth went to reduce poverty for those living on less than $1 a day. More growth means more greenhouse gas emissions, and in turn more rapid climate change, which then hurts the poorest most. (more…)

Crude price rises as attacks disrupt supply
Shell evacuates staff after pipeline targeted

Rory Carroll Africa correspondent Larry Elliott
Tuesday February 21, 2006
The Guardian

Militants in the Niger delta mounted fresh attacks on oil installations yesterday, extending a wave of sabotage which has crippled exports from Africa’s leading oil producer. The guerrillas seized a Nigerian army post in waterways east of the city of Warri after soldiers fled, allowing them to dynamite a floating barracks block and an oil pipeline operated by Royal Dutch Shell. A Shell spokeswoman confirmed the oil pipeline attack, and said the boat was abandoned when the attackers blew it up. It was unclear who owned the boat. The Anglo-Dutch multinational, the biggest foreign operator in Nigeria, has evacuated all its facilities in the immediate area, a stretch of creeks and swamps which normally produces 500,000 barrels a day.

The attacks sent oil prices surging in London amid concern that the world’s eighth largest producer was facing months of turmoil. Despite reassurances from the International Energy Agency (IEA), threats of further action from the rebels against installations in the Niger delta pushed up the price of a barrel of Brent crude by $1.46 to $61.35 in the City. Geoff Pyne, an independent oil consultant, said: “There is a realisation that no one can be complacent about supplies.” (more…)

Diderot has summarised Lovelock’s argument for nuclear energy for us. Perhaps the most contentious issue facing us today, whilst nuclear energy has always been the bete noire of environmentalists Lovelock has endorsed nuclear energy as the only practical solution to the twin crisis of global warming and energy supply. Diderot writes:

Lovelock devotes chapter 5 of his new book, “The Revenge of Gaia”, to a
discussion of our major energy options.  The background to the
discussion is Lovelock’s belief that the planet is poised to flip into a
new hotter stable state with average temperatures 8 degrees higher than
now.  It’s an equilibrium that Gaia has reached many times before, most
recently 55 million years ago when carbon dioxide was at a concentration
similar to the one we are currently creating.  No one knows when we’ll
flip but all known climate systems are now in positive feedback and we
can expect to move to ‘hot earth’ within the next century.  When we do
most parts of the planet will become uninhabitable, the sea will swallow
London.

With that in mind, Lovelock considers the energy options: (more…)

The mainstream media’s treatment of the peak oil issue amazes me. The ability, to see how dependent all aspects of our social structure are on cheap oil, and how the declining supply of that oil will directly lead to a decline in our social structures is staggering. It will not be a case of getting the train to work instead of your car. The practical reality is, a significant amount of our jobs won’t exist in the post carbon world. (more…)

ST. LOUIS — The search for El Dorado in the Amazonian rainforest might not have yielded pots of gold, but it has led to unearthing a different type of gold mine: some of the globe’s richest soil that can transform poor soil into highly fertile ground.That’s not all. Scientists have a method to reproduce this soil — known as terra preta, or Amazonian dark earths — and say it can pull substantial amounts of carbon out of the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, helping to prevent global warming. That’s because terra preta is loaded with so-called bio-char — similar to charcoal.

“The knowledge that we can gain from studying the Amazonian dark earths, found throughout the Amazon River region, not only teaches us how to restore degraded soils, triple crop yields and support a wide array of crops in regions with agriculturally poor soils, but also can lead to technologies to sequester carbon in soil and prevent critical changes in world climate,” said Johannes Lehmann, assistant professor of biogeochemistry in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Cornell University, speaking today (Feb. 18) at the 2006 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (more…)

When people hear the word “agriculture,” most think of food. But the benefits of agriculture are much more than farm fresh corn or dairy products. Now scientists are investigating how farmers can manage their land to offer everyone more environmental benefits, and whether farmers could be paid for providing these benefits.

“Agriculture, which includes planted forests, is the world’s largest human-managed ecosystem,” said Scott Swinton, professor of agricultural economics at Michigan State University. “There is a huge area of land that people manage for food, fiber and fuel – these are all marketed products with a value attached to them. What we want to know is if we can also manage agriculture for things that people like and appreciate, but don’t have markets, such as cleaner air, cleaner water, less global warming, wildlife habitat and aesthetics – many people enjoy seeing the green, open space of farmland in their communities.” (more…)

Millions of British Gas customers are facing higher bills after the firm raised its gas and electricity prices.The UK’s biggest energy supplier will raise gas and electricity tariffs by 22% from 1 March 2006. The firm blamed the increase on substantial rises in wholesale prices, up more than 70% since September. On Thursday, the European Commission said some European energy firms were holding back gas supplies, driving up prices of imports into the UK.

In the past few days, both EDF Energy and Scottish Power also have raised their prices. News of British Gas’s move prompted consumer groups to voice concerns about the effects of the increases.

(more…)

In what is possibly the largest-ever analysis of sustainable agriculture practices in developing countries, scientists working in Bangkok, Beijing, Mexico, Sri Lanka, and the U.K. conclude that these techniques improve farmers’ lives by increasing crop yields and preserving the local environment. According to a paper published in this issue of ES&T (pp 1114–1119), poor farmers increased their crop yields by an average of 79% by using techniques such as crop rotation, organic farming, and genetically modified seeds.

Sustainable agriculture practices used by the poor, like this vegetable farmer in southwestern Cambodia, can increase yields by 71%, new research shows.

“It’s an exciting report,” Dennis Keeney, emeritus professor at Iowa State University and founding director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, tells ES&T, especially the tables that summarize data from all 57 countries. “You can go right to it and get information without having to run all over the world,” he adds. (more…)

By Cóilín Nunan
31 January, 2006
Energy Bulletin

With speculation mounting over the possibility of a US- or Israeli-led military attack of Iran sometime later this year, it has been suggested that real motivation for US antipathy towards the Iranian government has little to do with concerns that Tehran is developing nuclear weapons. Some commentators have instead suggested that Iran’s real Iranian threat to the US and its economy is that, in defiance of the US administration, it is attempting to establish an oil ‘bourse’ (exchange) in March of this year which would enable oil to be traded in euros. This would move oil sales away from their usual denomination in dollars and would, it is argued, undermine the American currency with grave consequences for the US economy. (1,2) This internet-based debate is reminiscent of what occurred before the invasion of Iraq when several observers, myself included, hypothesised that Saddam Hussein’s decision to sell Iraqi oil in euros was perhaps one of the reasons the US wanted ‘regime change’. (3,4) The US decision after the invasion to return Iraqi oil sales to dollar denomination and to convert back into dollars all Iraqi foreign currency reserves, which had been in euros prior to the war, was certainly entirely consistent with this theory. (5) (more…)

This analysis will first look at recent developments concerning the Chinese economic and energy policies. This will be followed by an analysis of data concerning global oil consumption and peak oil. Finally, the data concerning China and the data concerning global energy and peak oil will be utilized to examine the possibility that China is preparing to launch a war against Russia to seize Russian far-east oil reserves. (more…)

Princeton University geology Professor Kenneth Deffeyes has been studying world petroleum production data and has come to the conclusion
that the world hit peak oil last December 16, 2005. If he is correct, total world oil production will never surpass what was produced last
December. From the article: ‘Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand
rise of roughly 3 percent. The high prices did not bring much additional oil out of the ground. Most oil-producing countries are in decline…The Saudi production for 2005 was 9.155 million barrels per day. On March 6, 2003 Saudi Aramco and the government of Saudi Arabia announced by way of the Dow Jones newswire that they were maxed out at 9.2 barrels per day…Ghawar, the supergiant Saudi oilfield, is producing increasing amounts of water along with the oil. When Simmons sent Twilight in the Desert to the printer, the water cut at Ghawar was around 30 percent. There are later reports on the Internet (home.entouch.net/dmd/ghawar.htm) of water cuts as high as 55 percent. Ghawar has been producing 4 million barrels per day; when the Ghawar field waters out, you can kiss your lifestyle goodbye”

http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/current-events.html

It seems to me that virtually every geopolitical story you read has looming behind it PEAK OIL but no one’s mentioning it…or at least not until now. That I got a letter published in the Guardian last month highlighting peak oil (to show off for a minute) demonstrates that the issue is mainstreaming http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1688962,00.html .
 
It’s mainstreaming fast, and that is because it’s real, and it’s now. Look at the last month… (more…)

After another evening experiencing a heady mixture of despair and panic in the face of mounting evidence of imminent systemic collapse I finally came across something that put a smile on my face, in a great essay drawing lessons from the collapse of the former Soviet Union for the citizens of the soon to be ‘former United States’. Perhaps I’ve been looking at this the wrong way all along - rather than wringing my hands in angst that: I lack any practical skills; can’t think of a profession with which to make some real money before the bloated fossil fuel economy consumes itself; live in the inner city not the sustainable countryside; and still haven’t got it together to buy that deep cycle battery pack - rather than all that, I should remember I despise the garish extravagances of consumerism anyway; derive no sense of identity from paid employment; and would quite happily live out my days pottering around with a few mates, some good books and the odd bottle of wine. Rather than worrying too much then about developing my survival skills my strategy in the face of impending collapse should be to cultivate enough credit that when the indicators are right I’ll max everything out on wine, fill the cellar to the ceiling and become a post-apocalyptic wine merchant. Read on… (more…)

A recent report published by the Global Policy Institute, “Crude Designs: The Rip Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth,” puts the invasion of Iraq and subsequent US and UK machinations to control Iraqi oil reserves firmly in the context of peak oil: (more…)