Documentary: How Big Oil Conquered The World

Africa's Energy Demands Are Starting To Skyrocket

Africa's Energy Consumption Growing Fastest In World -- Christian Science Monitor

Africa's energy demands are skyrocketing, but with 64 recent major discoveries of fuel deposits, it is in a good position to meet its needs. As the sun sets over Africa each day, instead of flicking a light switch or heating up the oven, most people put a match to a kerosene lantern or a burning ember to a charcoal stove. Africa, home to 15 percent of the world’s population, consumes just 3 percent of the world's energy output, and 587 million people, including close to three-quarters of those living in Sub-Saharan Africa, still have no access to electricity via national grids. But the situation is changing, and swiftly. At 4.1 percent growth, Africa’s per capita energy consumption is growing faster than anywhere else, driven by improved infrastructure, inward investment, and efforts to tackle corruption.  

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My Comment: These energy trends are going to guarantee a few things .... (1) global oil and energy prices will remain high, (2) global warming advocates will be alarmed, and (3) tensions and conflicts will start to develop between different African countries over energy supplies (i.e. South Sudan - Sudan oil deposits, Ethiopia wanting to dam the Nile river, Nigeria delta oil reserves, etc.).

The Future Of Energy In North America Is Tight Oil

A Cabot Oil and Gas natural gas drill is viewed at a hydraulic fracturing site on January 17, 2012 in Springville, Pennsylvania. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Tight Oil The Future Of Energy In North America -- Financial Post

Tight oil, the new oil source unlocked by new drilling technologies, is bearing such good results it could quickly compete with Canada’s oil sands as a top secure supply of North American oil.

With companies like Devon Energy Corp., Talisman Energy Inc., Encana Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp. pushing big spending toward tight oil, analysts are ratcheting up their production forecasts for the supplies, which are largely based in the United States.

“Tight oil is changing the landscape in North America,” Steve Fekete, managing consultant at Purvin & Gertz, said at an oil sands industry conference in Calgary this week.

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What Oil Shortage?

Rising Oil Production in Alberta: More Evidence Disproving Hubbert’s Peak -- New American

The latest report from the Calgary (Alberta, Canada) Herald was nothing but good news: The steadily declining production of light oil from 2002 to late 2010 has reversed itself completely and is now not only proving the power and principles of a free market but “will change the way we think about oil, with many weighty consequences…” says blogger Peter Tertzakian. The graph he provided here shows Alberta’s production declining by about 16,000 barrels per day (B/d) every year since 2002, dropping to just over 300,000 B/d in late 2010. Now, thanks to new capital, new technology, and new enthusiasm, production is close to 400,000 B/d. It also “could heighten the blood pressure of a few peak oil theorists,” said Tertzakian.

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Cairn Energy Strikes Oil In Greenland

Cairn Energy's Stena Forth Drillship. Cairn Energy

From Popular Mechanics:

Massive deposits could one day make Inuits the Saudis of the north.

They've found oil in Greenland. The success of a massive deep-water drilling rig operated by Cairn Energy, a Scottish company, could mean that the world's newest oil-and-gas rush is underway, this time in one of the globe's most remote, rugged and pristine locations. For Americans used to hearing about huge fossil fuel deposits in Venezuela, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Russia and other locations that are politically unstable or intermittently antagonistic toward the West, this could come as welcome news. Greenland is a lightly inhabited arctic wilderness administered for now by the unthreatening Scandinavian country of Denmark. The territory is counting on oil and mineral development to fund a gradual move toward independence, and the discovery is being cheered in Nuuk, Greenland's capital.

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Arctic Oil And Gas Drilling Ready To Take Off

Click on Image to Enlarge

From New Scientist:

DRILLING for oil kicked off in Greenland's Arctic waters last week - just weeks after the Deepwater Horizon leak was finally plugged - angering environmental groups. Cairn Energy, based in Edinburgh, UK, is the first company to explore Greenland's waters for oil. It won't be the last.

Interest in the Arctic - which holds 13 per cent of the world's remaining oil and 30 per cent of its gas - is booming, driven by the rising price of oil and a shortage of other places for multinational companies to drill.

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My Comment: Forget about Greenland, it is what Canada, the U.S., and Russia will be doing in the arctic that has the greatest potential on impacting the environment.

Plumbing The Depths For Oil

From The Economist:

Inside story: A recent wave of advances is enabling oil companies to detect and recover offshore oil in ever more difficult places.

IN OCTOBER 1947 a group of engineers from Kerr-McGee, an American oil company, drilled the world’s first offshore oil well that was completely out of sight of land. Located 17km (10.5 miles) off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico, the project involved a drilling deck no bigger than a tennis court. This platform was complemented by a number of refurbished navy barges left over from the second world war, which served as both storage facilities and sleeping quarters for the crew. A single derrick enabled drilling into the seabed, 4.6 metres (15 feet) below. Kerr-McGee’s offshore drilling gear is still used in the Gulf of Mexico. The reused barges, however, are long gone. Instead, far more elaborate equipment is now being used, and in much deeper water.

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Oil Production To Peak In 2014, Scientists Predict

From Live Science:

Predicting the end of oil has proven tricky and often controversial, but Kuwaiti scientists now say that global oil production will peak in 2014.

Their work represents an updated version of the famous Hubbert model, which correctly predicted in 1956 that U.S. oil reserves would peak within 20 years. Many researchers have since tried using the model to predict when worldwide oil production might peak.

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China And India Displacing OECD Oil Consumption

From Future Pundit:

Writing in a comment on a post at The Oil Drum Gregor Macdonald very succinctly sums up an energy future where China, India, and other rapidly developing countries gradually displace OECD countries as oil purchasers.

High oil prices are more painful to the OECD/Developed world user than the Developing world user. In the Developing world coal accounts for the largest chunk of BTU consumption, and the marginal utility to the new user of oil is high. In other words, the OECD user is embedded in a system where the historical consumption pattern has been to use much more oil per capita. But in the developing world, just a small amount of oil to the new user of oil is transformational. It will be the developing world therefore that will take oil to much, much higher prices in the next decade. They will use small amounts per capita, but the aggregate demand will be scary high. After all, the developing world's systems are not leveraged to oil. They are new users of oil--and unlike us, aren't married to a system that breaks from high oil prices.

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Oil And Gas Drilling In Greenland To Begin This Summer

From Popular Mechanics:

When the 748-foot Stena Forth plows into the deep waters of Greenland’s Disko West zone next summer, the advanced drillship will be taking the first crack at what could be the world’s biggest untapped reservoir of oil and gas. The ship, built by Samsung in South Korea’s Geoje shipyard just over a year ago, can drill to 35,000 feet, in 10,000 feet of water.

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Untold Levels Of Oil Sands Pollution On Athabasca River Confirmed

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 8, 2009) — After an exhaustive study of air and water pollution along the Athabasca River and its tributaries from Fort McMurray to Lake Athabasca, researchers say pollution levels have increased as a direct result of nearby oil sands operations.

University of Alberta biological sciences professor David Schindler was part of the team that conducted a long term air and water study and found high levels of Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds. PACs are a group of organic contaminants containing several known carcinogens, mutagens, and teratogens. The highest levels of PAC's were found within 50 kilometres of two major oil sands up graders.

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Extreme Oil: Scraping The Bottom Of Earth's Barrel

The bitumen in tar sands gives the earth a thick, mushy feel. This non-conventional oil is difficult and expensive to extract (Image: Lara Solt/Dallas Morning News/Corbis)

From New Scientist:

EIGHTY-FIVE million barrels. That's how much oil we consume every day. It's a staggering amount - enough to fill over 5400 Olympic swimming pools - and demand is expected to keep on rising, despite the impending supply crunch.

The International Energy Agency forecasts that by 2030 it will rise to about 105 million barrels per day with a commensurate increase in production (see graph), although whistle-blowers recently told The Guardian newspaper in London that insiders at the IEA believe the agency vastly over-estimates our chances of plugging that gap. The agency officially denies this.

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Abiotic Synthesis Of Methane: New Evidence Supports 19th-Century Idea On Formation Of Oil And Gas

An oil pump taps deposits of petroleum deep beneath the Earth. Scientists are reporting new evidence that oil may have originated from processes other that the decay of prehistoric plants. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 6, 2009) — Scientists in Washington, D.C. are reporting laboratory evidence supporting the possibility that some of Earth's oil and natural gas may have formed in a way much different than the traditional process described in science textbooks.

Their study is scheduled for Nov./Dec. issue of ACS' Energy & Fuels, a bi-monthly publication. Anurag Sharma and colleagues note that the traditional process involves biology: Prehistoric plants died and changed into oil and gas while sandwiched between layers of rock in the hot, high-pressure environment deep below Earth's surface. Some scientists, however, believe that oil and gas originated in other ways, including chemical reactions between carbon dioxide and hydrogen below Earth' surface.

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Petroleum's Long Good-bye

Credit: David Rosenberg/Getty Images

From Technology Review:

For the next few decades at least, liquid hydrocarbons--gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel--will continue to be the mainstays of transportation. They're cheap; refueling is fast; and their energy density, crucial to long-distance travel, is hard to beat.

"Advanced technology is going to happen slowly," says Daniel Sperling, the director of the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California at Davis and a member of the California Air Resources Board. "The focus needs to be on making conventional technology more efficient."

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Getting Beyond Petroleum Won't Be Easy

Nearly 1,500 cars are added to Beijing’s roads daily. Credit: Xiayang Liu/Corbis

From Technology Review:

Transportation defines our civilization. Where we live and work, the structure of our cities, the flow of global commerce--all have been shaped by transportation technologies. But modern transportation's reliance on fossil fuels cannot be sustained. Passenger planes, trains, and automobiles were responsible for nearly four billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2005--about 14 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted globally that year. If we continue to rely almost exclusively on petroleum to power these vehicles, they will be responsible for 11 billion to 18 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2050. That's because developing nations--which are home to 82 percent of the world's population and will be responsible for 98 percent of population growth in coming years--are on the verge of mass motorization. Auto ownership in the developing world is growing at a rate of 30 percent per year (see "Cleaner Vehicles by the Million").

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Quantcast New Technology Aimed At Increasing Oil Production

From US News And World Report/AP:

HOUSTON—Imagine having a nice ripe orange, ready for squeezing, but being able to get out only a small amount of juice. There's got to be more, you just can't get at it.

That's the frustration of the global oil business.

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Another Century Of Oil? Getting More From Current Reserves

LANCE IVERSEN Corbis

From Scientific American:

Amid warnings of a possible "peak oil," advanced technologies offer ways to extract every last possible drop.

On fourteen dry, flat square miles of California’s Central Valley, more than 8,000 horsehead pumps—as old-fashioned oilmen call them—slowly rise and fall as they suck oil from underground. Glittering pipelines crossing the whole area suggest that the place is not merely a relic of the past. But even to an expert’s eyes, Kern River Oil Field betrays no hint of the technological miracles that have enabled it to survive decades of dire predictions.

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The Other Peak Oil: Demand From Developed World Falling

OIL HALT: Demand for oil in developed countries could be passed its prime.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/FLCELLOGUY

From Scientific American:

Oil demand in industrialized countries peaked in 2005 and will not reach that high again, a new report predicts.

Demand for oil in developed nations peaked in 2005, and changing demographics and improved motor-vehicle efficiency guarantee that it won't hit those heights again, IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates says in a new report.

Reduced petroleum demand in developed nations could make their economic growth less vulnerable to oil price shocks, the report states.

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Range Of Peak Oil Dates All Too Soon To Prepare?

From Future Pundit:

The range of dates over which Peak Oil is expected to happen does not provide enough time for governments to prepare policies mitigate the impacts.

The debate over exactly when we will reach "peak oil" is irrelevant. No matter what new oil fields we discover, global oil production will start declining in 2030 at the very latest.

That's the conclusion of the most comprehensive report to date on global oil production, published on 7 October by the UK Energy Research Centre.

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'Significant Risk' Of Oil Production Peaking In Ten Years, Report Finds

Offshore oil rig at sunset. (Credit: iStockphoto/Kristian Stensønes)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 8, 2009) — A new report, launched by the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), argues that conventional oil production is likely to peak before 2030, with a significant risk of a peak before 2020. The report concludes that the UK Government is not alone in being unprepared for such an event - despite oil supplying a third of the world's energy.

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