Naked Oil
This is a guest post by Chris Cook, former compliance and market supervision director of the International Petroleum Exchange.
All is not as it appears in the global oil markets, which have become entirely dysfunctional and no longer fit for its purpo...
OPEC says, "Don’t Count on Us" for More Supply
This post appears in ASPO-USA's December 19th Newsletter.
The results of OPEC’s latest meeting to set oil production quotas were announced this morning. Instead of production targets for individual countries, a group production ceiling of 30 mil...
Wind Fights Solar; Triangle Wins
This is a guest post by Tom Murphy. Tom is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. This post originally appeared on Tom's blog Do the Math.
For me, the most delightful turn of events in the ultimate nerd-song ̶...
Geologic Resources Supply – Demand Model (GeRS-DeMo)
This is a guest post by Steve Mohr, who recently received his PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of Newcastle in Australia. He now works as a research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures.
Last year I placed a summary of my Ph...
Thoughts on why energy use and CO2 emissions are rising as fast as GDP
In a recent post, I discovered something rather alarming–the fact that in the last decade (2000 to 2010) both world energy consumption and the CO2 emissions from this energy consumption were rising as fast as GDP for the world as a whole. This re...
Pipeline changes to fix WTI /Brent spread are likely to add new problems
For many years, Brent oil (a European grade) and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil, a US grade, sold at close to the same price. Starting in January 2011, WTI price dropped below Brent, at times by more than 20%.
When the price of WTI dropped, the pric...
Is It Really Possible to Decouple GDP Growth from Energy Growth?
In recent years, we have heard statements indicating that it is possible to decouple GDP growth from energy growth. I have been looking at the relationship between world GDP and world energy use and am becoming increasingly skeptical that such a decoup...
New Dept. of Energy Priority-Setting Analysis Seriously Flawed
The US Department of Energy (DOE) recently issued a report called Report on the first Quadrennial Technology Review (QTR), which has as its purpose helping the DOE choose among conflicting priorities.
The new report sets priories based on a distorted ...
ASPO-USA Conference, November 2 – 5; Letter to Secretary Chu
Conference Next Week
The Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA's conference in Washington DC, "Peak Oil, Energy, and the Economy" will be held next week. There is still time to register. Details are available on ASPO-USA's Conference Website.
The m...
Are We Reaching “Limits to Growth”?
It looks to me as though 2012 is likely to be a truly awful financial year, with several crises converging:
Either very high oil prices or recession,
The US governmental debt limit crisis,
The Euro crisis,
The Chinese debt problem,
Debt deleveraging i...
Kidding Ourselves About Future Middle East/North Africa Oil Production
Recently, the International Energy Agency’s Chief Economist Fatih Birol was quoted as saying,
In the next 10 years, more than 90% of the growth in global oil production needs to come from MENA [Middle East and North African] countries. There are...
Drilling Down: Tainter and Patzek Tell the Energy-Complexity Story
Joseph Tainter and Tadeusz Patzek are authors of a soon-to-be-released book called Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma. This book is part of Charles Hall's Briefs in Energy series with the publisher Springer. An earlier book in t...
