Gas Boom Goes Bust
The current boom in drilling for ‘unconventional’ gas has helped raise US production to levels not seen since the early 1970′s. This has been an incredible boon to consumers and has kept spot prices contained below $5 per million BTU ...
TheOilDrum.com Archive 2005-2011
During the past seven years, TheOilDrum.com has hosted analysis and discussion surrounding the possibility and implications of a near term peak in global oil production and importance of energy to society in general. Out of the ~8,500 articles posted h...
Drumbeat: February 6, 2012
Debate rages on when oil will peak
The discussion about the peak oil proposition is as lively as ever across the divide between proponents and opponents.
Peak oil is when the maximum rate of world oil production is reached and the rate enters termina...
Tech Talk – Oil and Natural Gas in Eastern Siberia
In the last post on Russian oil production, I discussed the amounts of oil produced from Western Siberia, the region with the highest current production, which in its prime contained the second largest producing oilfield in the world at Samotlor. Those...
Drumbeat: February 4, 2012
Gazprom 'unable to pump extra gas to Europe'
Gazprom said on Saturday it could not pump additional gas to Western Europe amid a cold snap, after EU officials said the Russian giant's deliveries had dropped in several countries.
"Gazprom at the moment ...
The 2012 BP Energy Outlook 2030
There are many unintended consequences as fuel supplies become more scarce and expensive. (With a h/t to Rune Likvern), I see that those Greeks who are being starved of affordable fuel are starting to chop trees down for warmth and income. This sort o...
Drumbeat: February 3, 2012
Once, men abused slaves. Now we abuse fossil fuels
Intriguing similarities between slavery and our current dependence on fossil-fuel-powered machines struck me: both perform roughly the same functions in society (doing the hard and dirty work that no o...
Basking in the Sun
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.
Who hasn’t enjoyed heat from the sun? Doing so represents a direct ...
Drumbeat: February 1, 2012
Thomas Homer-Dixon: Our peak oil premium
Peak oil – it’s history, right?
Everything has changed so fast.
Two years ago, the world was facing an intractable oil crisis. “By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear,” the U...
The Hydrogen Dream
Last week I went to Longwy's university campus, the Institut Universitaire de Technologie (part of the University of Lorraine), for a conference on renewable energies and energy efficiency. It was an event integrated in an InterReg project for innovati...
Drumbeat: January 30, 2012
The End of Elastic Oil
The last ten years have brought a structural change to the world oil market, with changes in demand increasingly playing a role in maintaining the supply/demand balance. These changes will come at an increasingly onerous cost to...
Tech Talk – Oil Production from Western Siberia
Time marches on, and as I noted in an earlier post, the declining fortunes of the Romashkino and other oilfields in the Volga-Urals Basin led into the development of the fields of Western Siberia, where even some forty years after it was discovered, ju...
