Hawaii Clean Power

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 of desperation has devastated the countryside all over Albania, Africa, and Asia, and it is extremely difficult to stop the practice from spreading or to recover from it. The world expects that fuel must be available at an affordable…

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 energetic transfer—via radiation—from the sun’s hot surface to your skin. One square meter can catch about 1000 W, which is comparable to the output of a portable space heater. A dark surface can capture the energy at nearly…

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.S. Defence Department declared in a major report. “A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity.”

But now we’re told that the world is awash in oil. Deepwater production from the Gulf of Mexico and offshore Brazil is soaring.…

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 our economy unless we take steps to make our demand for oil more flexible.

We’re not running out of oil. There’s still plenty of oil still in the ground. Oil which was previously too expensive to exploit becomes economic with…

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 innovation, called Tigre, gathering institutions from Lorraine, Saarland, Luxembourg, and Wallonie. It kicked off with a session on tri-generation, and went on with parallel sessions on waste biomass, and on hydrogen and fuel cells. I opted for the latter, feeling really curious about…

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, just over 60% of Russian crude is still being produced today.

Russian production in 2009, broken down by region (the total is 10.48 mbd) (EIA)

Back in 2007, production was at 70% of total Russian crude oil production with a…

With Gas So Cheap and Well Drilling Down, Why Is Gas Production So High?

This is a guest post by David Hughes, a geoscientist, president of a consultancy dedicated to research on energy and sustainability issues, and a fellow of Post Carbon Institute, on whose website this article first appeared.

Natural gas prices have declined to below $3.00/mcf, levels not seen for years, yet the EIA posted the highest gas production ever in October, 2011. U.S. gas production is growing despite annual well completion rates that are half that at the peak of the drilling boom…

Tech Talk – Oil production From Western Siberia

Russian production in 2009, broken down by region (the total is 10.48 mbd) (EIA)

Back in 2007, production was at 70% of total Russian crude oil production with a…

Drumbeat: January 28, 2012

BP emails reveal company veiling spill rate estimates from well even as rig sank

NEW ORLEANS — On the day the Deepwater Horizon sank, BP officials warned in an internal memo that if the well was not protected by the blow-out preventer at the drill site, crude oil could burst into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 3.4 million gallons a day, an amount a million gallons higher than what the government later believed spilled daily from the site.

The…

Drumbeat: January 27, 2012

Everything You Know About Peak Oil Is Wrong

We’ve been warned before. Four decades ago this year, five scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published an influential set of predictions regarding the sustainability of human progress. Titled Limits to Growth, their report suggested the world was heading toward economic collapse as it exhausted the natural resources, such as oil and copper, required for economic production. The report forecast that the world would run out of new gold in 2001 and…