Peak oil

Some food for thought for a Sunday. Excellent follow on chat from the must watch video I posted last week. .....

Perhaps there was a time when it wasn’t important to be knowledgeable, but now is not that time. I highly recommend everybody watch/listen to this, because it is the best thing I have seen for a while showing the big picture of where we are, and where we are going: Since all our money is loaned onto existence, our economy has to grow exponentially. Martenson proves this point empirically by showing a 99.9% fit .....

I thought this was worth a post since once you understand this, it makes it a lot easier to understand the global economic situation we are living through right now: Energy returned on energy invested is the ratio of the amount of usable energy acquired from a particular energy resource to the amount of energy expended to obtain that energy resource. When the EROEI of a resource is less than or equal to one, that ene .....

Oil demand (excluding biofuels) rises from 87 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2010 to 99 mb/d in 2035. The total number of passenger cars doubles to almost 1.7 billion in 2035. Sales in non-OECD markets exceed those in the OECD by 2020, with the centre of gravity of car manufacturing shifting to non-OECD countries before 2015. The rise in oil use comes despite some impressive gains in fuel economy in many regions, .....

With 40% of the world in or near recession, how come oil prices are still so high and much higher than last year, when the economies in Europe and the U.S. were expanding? The number of vehicle miles driven in the U.S. is still below the level reached 43 months ago and at the same level as early 2005. The price of a barrel of oil in early 2005 was $42. The U.S. is using the same amount of oil, but the price is up 112 .....

Drowning in debt, the OECD did have one little nest egg tucked away in the form of strategic petroleum reserves (SPR). Yesterday the International Energy Agency (IEA), an OECD organisation, decided to raid these meager savings in order to try and keep the global growth party alive. The recognition that high oil and energy prices were threatening a weak and faltering recovery is an admission by the OECD that high oil .....

Not like it wasn’t expected or anything. Is there a plan B? hell no. I am no fan of nuclear power really but it seems all countries are decommissioning their nuclear plants right about the time we will need them more than ever. LONDON (Reuters) – OPEC followed this week’s failure to reach an output deal with a forecast world oil supplies would begin to fall short later this year, draining inventorie .....

I read this full chapter of the WEO report and pulled out some excerpts for you. They try to put a positive spin on it somewhat, but clearly acknowledge for the first time the serious nature of peak oil on the global economy. This fact alone is fairly significant, even if rather late: The persistent increase in oil prices over the past decade suggests that global oil markets have entered a period of increased scarcit .....

Hear, hear. .....

http://www.oilposter.org .....

Not in complete agreement with this article as to start a transition away from oil would be a good outcome and high oil prices should help, the trouble is there is nothing really to transition to yet. Or at all. Plus, as much as I loved the electric KTM SX prototype I tested, internal combustion engines are still much more versatile and will be around for a (long) while yet, just being increasingly more expensive to .....

The global economy had no sooner put in its first year of solid growth when world oil demand, like a jack in the box, sprang to a new record high. China alone added almost a million barrels a day to global demand, which ended the year at more than 87 million barrels a day. And demand shows no sign of abating this year. It was far from clear where the world was going to find another two million barrels a day of new su .....