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Brazil is an amazing country, full of natural richness and blessed with many beauties. It has, however, a terrible sin on his shoulders: the thought that everything has to be done in a different, shorter, and faster way – in a way that takes advantage of everything. This is also why Brazil is currently undergoing a huge economic and political crisis, particularly reflected by the lack of confidence of our people in our government. At the same time, this is precisely what makes people overthink their values, and so a silent revolution is happening.

I work with the Transition Town Movement in Brazil from the moment it has started in our country. Being one of the people who brought it here, I feel like a witness of how its seeds are growing and how we start thinking about another way of living that is more sustainable and resilient.

In the early times of the movement we talked a lot about peak oil and climate change and about how we can degrow our consumption and stop climate change. Today, however, with the passing of the years and the growth of the movement, we feel that one of the biggest contributions of the movement to our society is incentivizing cooperation between people and encouraging creativity to find solutions to these problems.

This collaboration is even creating new ways of doing business in Brazil, the “collaborative economy” or “reconomy” where growth and consumption are not the highest priority, but the pursuit of a meaningful and much happier life. In the light of this, there are suddenly many beautiful business proposals around where collaboration and not consumption is the key to this new way of living. Some of these innovative business ideas I would like to share with you here.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Despite Cheap Gas, Coming Back to Peak Oil [Infographic]

November 22, 2015

Despite Cheap Gas, Coming Back to Peak Oil [Infographic]

Yesterday, in Virginia, I filled up my gas tank for $2.75 a gallon.

At that price, even old peak oilers like my wife and I hardly think about poor old King Hubbard’s theory much these days.

And though gas has been cheap in the U.S. for the last six months or more, I still think Hubbard was right that global oil production naturally has a point of peak production.

I used to think that the peak of world oil production already came in 2006. But with the rise of fracking and other extreme fossil fuels, now I’m not so sure.

Could the oil peak come a decade or more in the future as the optimists mentioned in the infographic below predict?

Or could the whole thing be some kind of confusing shell game, with financial markets moving petro dollars around in clever ways to make it look like oil hasn’t peaked yet, when, in fact, it has?

Frankly, as a lay observer of the energy economy, such questions are above my pay grade. I’ll leave petroleum geologists and economists to argue about the real oil supply and its likely effect on the economy in the next five, ten or twenty years.

Meanwhile, the infographic below may be good enough for other laypeople to get the basic facts on the peak oil debate.

The image is courtesy of an energy-services company in the U.K. called Chiltern Thrust Bore. I’m not sure what they think of peak oil, but I’m sure they hope to be able to drill and dig for stuff for a while longer.

Whatever the case, their take on peak oil seems to be a accurate summary of Hubbert’s theory and a plausible analysis of what it means for today and the future.

— Erik Curren, Transition Voice

The “Syrian Sickness”: What Crude Oil Gives, Crude Oil Can Take Back.

November 22, 2015

The “Syrian Sickness”: What Crude Oil Gives, Crude Oil Can Take Back.

Syria is one of the greatest disasters of recent times. Here, I argue that the origins of the Syrian collapse are to be found in the economic downturn generated by the gradual depletion of the Syrian oil reserves. Crude oil had created modern Syria, crude oil has destroyed it. This phenomenon can be termed the “Syrian Sickness” and the question is: “which country will be affected next?”

Crude oil is a great source of wealth for the countries that possess it. But it is also a wealth that comes as a cycle. Normally, the cycle spans several decades, even more than a century, so that those who live through it may completely miss the fact that they are heading to the end of their wealth. The cycle is especially visible in those areas where the amount of oil is modest; then, the cycle goes faster; wealth and misery appear one after the other in a dramatic series of events.

One of these rapid cycles of growth and decline is that of Syria. It is a country that never became a major world producer, less than 1% of the world’s total production when it peaked, around 1995. (graph below, from Gail Tverberg’s blog). For the small Syrian economy, however, even this limited amount was important

The Syruan oil production went through its unavoidable cycle over a span of little more than three decade. Depletion generated progressively higher production costs and that led to a scarcity of capital investments to keep production increasing. The result was the “bell shaped” production curve that is often called the “Hubbert curve”. Eventually, around 2011, the internal consumption curve crossed the production curve and that transformed the country from an oil exporter to an oil importer. The cross-over point corresponded to the start of the civil war.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Case For Peak Oil

November 21, 2015

The Case For Peak Oil

All charts below were created with data from JODI, the EIA and OPEC MOMR. It is in thousand barrels per day and the last data point is September 2015.

World crude oil production has taken off during the last two years due primarily to US shale oil production and higher output from OPEC. However very high oil prices has enabled many other countries to increase drilling rigs and production.

Low oil prices are having an effect on Non-OPEC oil production though not nearly as much as a lot of people thought they would, and not nearly as soon either.

Five nations, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Russia, USA and Canada, have been responsible for way more than 100 percent of the increase in oil production in the last decade.

The world less the five nations charted above is down 5,000,000 barrels per day since 2005. This decline is despite the fact that oil prices, during much of that time, has been above $100 a barrel.

A look at the Non-OPEC segment of this group.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Right Again, Pt. 1

November 18, 2015

Right Again, Pt. 1

Human nature being what it is, predictably there are those who still harbor doubts about certain issues pertaining to current and future fossil fuel supplies. There is, however, no doubt that there’s an over-abundance of juvenile, fact-free nonsense passing as gospel truth from industry cheerleaders and media counterparts.

To whose benefit these tactics accrue is not at all in doubt, either: it’s certainly notcitizens depending on others to provide them with the facts about and implications of matters outside the scope of their daily responsibilities and concerns.

If consequences to all of us weren’t an important consideration, it would be amusing if slightly annoying to deal with barely-knowledgeable and and even less-honest commentary about vast resources for centuries, yadda yadda yadda.

But a public with little appetite for, interest in, or opportunity to investigate crucial matters on their own continues to be subjected to a steady stream of misinformation, barely-there facts, and and outright lies by a group whose self-serving professional and financial interests leave no room for the public’s well-being—now, or in the years to come.

Tax policy, climate change, energy supply, tobacco, health care … the subject matter may be different, but the tactics are culled from the same Gospel of Deceit and Distraction. The strategy is employed by a large-enough group whose membership is either genuinely daft and thus has no business peddling pseudo-information to an unsuspecting public, or they are woefully short on supplies of integrity and consideration for the welfare of … well, anyone else.

Must be nice….

As Exhibit B this time around, we have this remarkably cherry-picked piece of fluff entitled “Earth Is An Oil-Producing Machine — We’re Not Running Out.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Absolutely Right

November 11, 2015

Absolutely Right

Good to see that even after months on hiatus, not much changes on the Right, right? First up:

The shale revolution has opened additional centuries of low-cost hydrocarbon resources to modern society….
The anti-fossil fuel environmental movement is in despair. For decades, proponents of the ideology of sustainable development preached that humanity was running out of oil and gas, that consumption of hydrocarbons was destroying the climate, and that renewable energy was rapidly becoming a cost-effective alternative. But the Shale Shock has slain peak oil and promises low-cost oil and gas for centuries to come. [1]

Yup! Except for those still-pesky facts, juvenile name-calling, and not actually addressing those issues, we indeed have additional centuries of hydrocarbon “resources” at our beck and call. Click our heels together; close our eyes; wish real hard; ignore reality; ignore our future; skip past the facts; omit explanations or critical distinctions, and presto!

If the “The anti-fossil fuel environmental movement is in despair” it’s because a legion of misinformers with public platforms continue to disseminate falsehoods [while ignoring a substantial body of facts supplying the full story and not just the partial one they massage for the benefit of the few], with a heaping shovelful of disingenuous, cherry-picked pseudo-truths for good measure. The public sure as hell isn’t being served by the ongoing stream of nonsense.

An important aspect of the pesky-facts portion of the discussion: oil producers can’t earn profits when the cost of oil is low. The “Shale Shock” works when prices are high.

Consumers as a rule don’t like high prices all that much. That puts a dent in the mandate for high prices to continue the “Shale Shock.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The US-Russia gas pipeline war in Syria could destabilise Putin

October 31, 2015

The US-Russia gas pipeline war in Syria could destabilise Putin

Military solutions are not the answer to the perfect storm of climate, energy, food, economic and geopolitical crises facing Russia

For the last few years, the Saudi kingdom’s insistence on pumping oil at high capacity has dramatically depressed oil prices. The result has undermined Saudi’s major oil rivals in OPEC – like Iran and Venezuela.

It has also hit Russia, hard.

Rating agency Standard & Poor forecasts that Russia’s budget deficit is set to swell to 4.4 per cent of GDP this year. Russia’s own finance ministry concedes that if expenditures continue at this rate, within sixteen months – by around the end of next year – its oil reserve funds will be exhausted.

Meanwhile, over the last year real incomes have dropped by 9.8 per cent, and food prices have spiked by 17 per cent, heightening the risk of civil unrest.

System failure

Rumbling along beneath the surface of such financial woes are deeper systemic issues.

A report from the Swedish Defence Research Agency notes that “prolonged dry periods in southern Russia are having the effect of reducing the level of food production”.

Most of Russia’s wheat imports come from Kazakhstan, “where climate change is expected to exacerbate droughts. These impacts would make farming harder and food more expensive,” observe Dr. Marina Sharmina and Dr. Christopher Jones of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

Russia’s looming energy crisis is the other elephant in the room. In 2013, HSBC forecasted that Russia would hit peak oil between 2018 and 2019, experiencing a brief plateau before declining by 30 per cent from 2020 to 2025.

That year, Fitch Ratings came to pretty much the same conclusion. And last year, Leonid Fedun, vice-president of Russia’s second largest oil producer, Lukoil, predicted that the production could peak earlier due to falling oil prices and US-EU sanctions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Looking Back 10 Years After Peak Oil

October 27, 2015

Looking Back 10 Years After Peak Oil

All views expressed here are those of Verwimp Bruno and do not necessarily represent those of Ron Patterson.

1. INTRODUCTION

Peak Oil is the moment in time when, on a global scale, the maximum rate of oil production is reached. The moment after which oil production, by nature, must decline forever. Since Earth is a closed system, next to this production (supply) event, there must be an equal demand event: Peak Oil Consumption. Since there are no substantial above ground deposits, Peak Oil Production and Peak Oil Consumption must coincide. The world consists of a lot of different countries, some of which are already far beyond peak oil production That leads to the assumption the world as a whole reaches peak oil production. On the demand side, it is worth looking, because different countries have different economies, different degrees of development, and so on, if, while some countries still experience significant growth in oil consumption, some countries are already well beyond Peak Oil Consumption by now.

2. PRODUCTION vs CONSUMPTION

The production history of crude oil is well documented. For all relevant OPEC and NON-OPEC countries the data are gathered by Peakoilbarrel.com here, OPEC Charts, and here, Non-OPEC Charts, respectively. It is clear some countries have reached peak oil production long time ago. For readers of this blog, familiar with these data, this is no surprise. Still world oil production is growing, because some countries make up for the countries that are losing production. Many readers of Peakoilbarrel.com wonder when the exact moment will be when global oil production will have reached that ultimate peak. But how relevant is that moment? Will it bring doom, gloom, the end of motoring, plastics and tooth paste. It might be more interesting to know whether your country is before, beyond or at Peak Oil Consumption right now. And what about coal and natural gas?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Peak Oil will save us from Climate Change:” a meme that never went viral

October 13, 2015

“Peak Oil will save us from Climate Change:” a meme that never went viral

Image from “Peaksurfer“

The idea that peak oil will save us from climate change has been occasionally popping up in the debate, but it never really gained traction for a number of good reasons. One is that, in many cases, the proponents were also climate science deniers and that made them scarcely credible. Indeed, if climate change does not exist (or if it is not caused by human activities), then how is it that you are telling us that peak oil will save us from it? Add to this that many hard line climate science deniers are also peak oil deniers (since, as well known, both concepts are part of the great conspiracy), then, it is no surprise that the meme of “peak oil will save us” never went viral.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t ask the question of whether we have sufficient amounts of fossil fuel to generate a truly disastrous climate change. The debate on this point goes back to the early 2000s. At the beginning, the data were uncertain and it was correctly noted that some of the IPCC scenarios overestimated what we are likely to burn in the future. But, by now, I think the fog has cleared. It is becoming increasingly clear that fossil fuel depletion is not enough, by far, to save us from climate change.

Nevertheless, some people still cling to the old “peak oil will save us” meme. In a recent post on “Energy Matters“, Roger Andrews argues that:

All of the oil and gas reserves plus about 20% of the coal reserves could be consumed without exceeding the IPCC’s trillion-tonne carbon emissions limit.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Peak Oil Ass-Backwards (part 3): Forget Austerity and Grexit – it’s Time for a Gretaway!

October 1, 2015

“Taaaaake myyyyyy moneeeeey! Pleeeeeease!”

So here we are on this precipice of sorts, staring upon the twilight of the industrial economy due to peaking energy supplies and thus peaking credit supplies (as explained in part 2 of this 3-part series).

Simply put, being on the peak oil plateau, and with fossil fuel supplies in general reaching their limits (and getting more expensive to extract), there’s going to increasingly be less and less of the stuff to go around. This means one of two things, the first being that what’s left gets spread around thinner and thinner between all the participants. However, since people of the West (and especially those in the richer parts) have become quite used to their energy-intensive lifestyles and seem to have zero intention of giving them up, this likely implies the implementation of the second approach: cut back on – if not cut off – the fuel supplies to people and nations on the lower rungs of industrial civilization. That way, as the fossil fuel pie continues to shrink, those on the higher rungs don’t have to reduce their share too drastically. In effect, this allows for those in the upper echelons of contemporary civilization to hold on to their Nyet-Flix feeds and iGizmos just a bit longer, until the triaging inevitably hits them as well and/or the bottom just completely falls out.

This triaging can be accomplished in more than one way, but for the time being two methods stand out as the most popular. The first is what we know as austerity – cuts are made upon people’s pensions, hours, welfare cheques, whatever, so that they have less credit (read: money) to buy and indulge in the spoils of industrialization. Unfortunately, living in this modern world of ours means that the basic necessities of life (such as food) also often fall under the umbrella of industrialization, so being triaged can entail much more than an inconvenient loss of iGizmos.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

US shale oil too expensive, peaks 1H 2015

September 30, 2015

US shale oil too expensive, peaks 1H 2015

According to EIA data, monthly US crude oil production peaked in April 2015 at 9.6 mb/d.

Fig 1: US crude oil production to June 2015

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbblpd_m.htm

The above graph shows that US crude production increased by around 4 mb/d between mid 2011 and mid 2015, mostly from shale oil which took off – with a delay – when oil prices exceeded US$ 80-90. That stellar growth has come to an end, also with a delay, after oil prices plummeted.

Let’s zoom into the period starting with January 2014:

Fig 2: US incremental crude production Jan 2014 – Jun 2015

The April 2015 peak was caused by higher GOM production resulting from production start-ups after lifting the drilling moratorium in 2010. Shale oil peaked one month earlier, after the winter drop. However, month by month production can change and future revisions of data are likely due to reporting delays. What is more important than the month of peaking is the fact that US oil production stopped growing.

(Note: Incremental production is calculated as production minus the minimum production in the period under consideration. The sum of the minimum production is the base production)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Low Oil Prices – Why Worry?

September 30, 2015

Low Oil Prices – Why Worry?

Most people believe that low oil prices are good for the United States, since the discretionary income of consumers will rise. There is the added benefit that Peak Oil must be far off in the distance, since “Peak Oilers” talked about high oil prices. Thus, low oil prices are viewed as an all around benefit.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The Peak Oil story we have been told is wrong. The collapse in oil production comes from oil prices that are too low, not too high. If oil prices or prices of other commodities are too low, production will slow and eventually stop. Growth in the world economy will slow, lowering inflation rates as well as economic growth rates. We encountered this kind of the problem in the 1930s. We seem to be headed in the same direction today. Figure 1, used by Janet Yellen in her September 24 speech, shows a slowing inflation rate for Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE), thanks to lower energy prices, lower relative import prices, and general “slack” in the economy.

What Janet Yellen is seeing in Figure 1, even though she does not recognize it, is evidence of a slowing world economy. The economy can no longer support energy prices as high as they have been, and they have gradually retreated. Currency relativities have also readjusted, leading to lower prices of imported goods for the United States. Both lower energy prices and lower prices of imported goods contribute to lower inflation rates.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Will declines in U.S. and Canadian oil production lead to a global decline?

September 28, 2015

Will declines in U.S. and Canadian oil production lead to a global decline?

At the beginning of this year I noted that all of the growth in world oil production* since 2005 has come from two countries: the United States and Canada. And, I suggested that since the growth in production in those two countries came from high-cost deposits–tight oil in the United States and tar sands in Canada–that the precipitous drop in oil prices would lead to declines in production in both countries.

I concluded that unless another area of the world suddenly started growing its oil production significantly that those declines would probably result in a worldwide decline in oil production.

Well, declines in the both the United States and Canada have arrived. It will be several months before we can know with any certainty whether those declines will translate into a persistent global decline. But this much we do know:

The International Energy Agency, a consortium of 29 countries tasked with tracking worldwide energy trends, said in its latest report that global oil production fell 600,000 barrels per day in July–and here’s the important part–“mainly on lower non-OPEC output.” That’s a reference to falling U.S. and Canadian production. One month does not make a trend. But the report notes that non-OPEC supply is expected to contract in 2016.

The report said that further declines in U.S. production are expected. Weekly estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, bear this out. The EIA put U.S. production at 9.1 million barrels per day (mbpd) for the week ending September 18; that’s down from 9.6 mbpd in early June.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Clock Is Ticking On The U.S. Dollar As World’s Reserve Currency

September 22, 2015

The Clock Is Ticking On The U.S. Dollar As World’s Reserve Currency

The View From Hubbert’s Peak

In 1971, the American President put an end to a 2,500 year trend; the Wall Street Journal called it “Nixon’s Worst Weekend.” Considering the old boy had some really bad ones, this must have been something special. In August of that year (on Friday the 13th) it was decided that the U.S. would no longer pay out gold for its paper dollars. OPEC Ministers took note, and in September they met, deciding it would be necessary to collect more paper dollars, if possible, since gold was no longer on offer and oil was the only asset they had to sell.

It would take another two years for those decisions to matter (during the October 1973 embargo in the wake of another Arab-Israeli war). The Oil Embargo marked the end of ‘free’ energy, and kicked off a massive rise in the price of oil because the U.S., the world’s swing producer since Colonel Drake’s Pennsylvania strike in 1859, had finally reached peak production at around 10 million barrels per day in 1970. This moment is the original Hubbert’s Peak, the beginning of decline for the U.S. oil industry, at least until recently. The surge in U.S. production since 2010 has stalled out around 9.5 mb/d and, due to the Saudi decision to give the American tight oil producers ‘a good sweating,’ that rate has begun to fall in the last few months.

It is certainly possible that U.S. production will surpass the 1970 peak, but with low prices it is hard to say when that will be; it is also hard to say how long that will last as tight oil wells have a devilishly high rate of decline. It is worth noting, as Arthur Berman has recently done in his fine article, that even the best producers are losing money now, and lots more are being lost by those who are not the best. Making it up on volume is a dog that does not hunt for $45.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What happened to peak oil? The cycle of a meme and of its antimemes

September 21, 2015

What happened to peak oil? The cycle of a meme and of its antimemes

The result of a Google Trends search for the term “Peak Oil”. The fading out of the concept may be due not so much to reasons related to the validity (or non validity) of the concept but, rather, to a memetic phenomenon equivalent to the development of an immune response in the human body. Not all memes have sufficient viral power to entrench themselves in the human mindspace.

Likely, you haven’t heard much, lately, about peak oil. If you did, it was because it was summarily dismissed as “wrong”. Indeed, as you see in the figure above, peak oil had a peak of interest around 2006, a second one around 2008, then it gradually declined.

Why this decline? You might say that it was because the recent drop in oil prices. Maybe, but note, from the figure, that the interest in peak oil started a steady decline just when oil prices went up to reach a plateau at levels over 100 $/barrel. Then, you might say that the decline is because peak oil didn’t appear when it was predicted. Maybe, but the record of the “peakist” approach is not bad at all when compared with of mainstream oil pundits. Had any of them anticipated such things as the burst of high oil prices that started in 2005? Did any of them foresee that the oil industry would have had to switch to expensive and difficult resources, that they had always shunned before, in order to keep production from falling?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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