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Post by Wayne Hall on Jun 28, 2005 22:39:16 GMT -5
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Post by Wayne Hall on Jul 6, 2005 22:21:22 GMT -5
AND THE BAND PLAYED ON: Roscoe Bartlett Meets Bush on Peak Oil
By Michael C. Ruppert© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only. July 1, 2005 0800 PST (FTW) -- Well, this is a real head scratcher. A story pops up today saying that Congressman Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland just had a private one-on-one with George W. about Peak Oil. I spent just over an hour with Mr. Bartlett in his office in Washington two weeks ago. I was there for a family reunion after the death of my father. (Three generations of my father's family have lived in D.C. since coming from Germany. Three - including me - were born there. Irony: my father flew in B17s bombing Germany during WWII.) Bartlett seemed incredibly well versed on the subject of Peak Oil and Gas - aware; and he also sang the praises of many people well known to us at FTW like Richard Heinberg, Julian Darley, Dale Allen Pfeiffer and Matt Savinar. None of us are conservative Republicans to say the very least and I'd pay good money to see Roscoe Bartlett sit down with Stan Goff or Jamey Hecht for an hour. But that's only part way through the looking glass. It got deeper. More irony. Bartlett asked the right questions. He shared the right doubts. He asked my opinions. I praised many of us out here, offered to send him more information. I told him who could answer his questions. He asked for help before I could even make the offer. What else could/would I do? He was paying attention. He delayed his next appointment for a few minutes because he hadn't finished with me yet. It was a big one. In short, I liked him. I told him he had become my second favorite Republican after Ron Paul of Texas (Houston to be precise) who doesn't seem to believe in Peak Oil. So this sudden meeting between Bartlett and Bush puzzles me. Bartlett has made, I think, six special order presentations on Peak Oil on the floor of the House. I had seen two. A map I had made for FTW had been shown in one of them. Bartlett's staff knew who I was and that I had written a book charging George Bush and Dick Cheney with murder: with premeditation; and on multiple counts. His staff knew that I have a 29-year record of opposing the Bushes. GHWB was the Director of Central Intelligence when the CIA attempted to recruit me into a drug protection operation in 1976. That's what ended my LAPD career and nearly my life... on more than one occasion. www.fromthewilderness.com/ssci.shtml. But there in his office (along with many other charts produced by peak oil activists) was one of our FTW world maps. I guess it went to the White House with Bartlett and the rest of the charts and graphs. Who could write such irony? There are many things in play and many things -- as Cynthia McKinney and I say to each other -- "moving under the carpet". (Thanks to Al Giordano of narconews for that one.) The meeting between Bartlett and Bush may have many possible meanings and I won't jump to conclusions yet. But if I were forced to speculate, I'd say that probably someone in Washington or the administration asked a really stupid question like: "You know, it might be a good idea to figure out how much the people really know about Peak and what they're starting to do about it. Who's leading them? What are the various positions? Have Roscoe start talking about it on the floor. DeLay or Hastert can arrange that. The people will come to him. Then he can brief us." That would be my guess. I sure can picture Karl Rove saying that. But who knows? It is equally possible, based on present knowledge, that Mr. Bartlett just took it up on his own, and really might be a good guy (of sorts). Lord knows, they're all hearing about it every day on the Hill. It had to attract somebody's attention sooner or later. It was only the oncoming collapse of most of human civilization… Bottom line: It's entirely possible that Mr. Bartlett actually gives a s---. It's possible that what he's learning is moving him. It remains to be seen what an elder-senior Republican congressman with few allies (on the subject) could accomplish; or whether he could fight the fight if it became necessary or for how long? We can only hope. And we can pray. There are far too many good reasons to hold one's breath these days. The saddest thing however -- even almost as sad as my father's death -- was the fact that as I walked the halls of the Rayburn, Hart and Cannon office buildings I saw that all the hallways were empty, deserted, vacant. In just a few small spots, outside hearing rooms or where tour buses stopped, there were a few people. Otherwise, the Hill, where Washington's lifeblood flowed, was a ghost town. I first started walking Capitol Hill in 1981. Then I was seeking help for what had happened to me as a whistleblower in an era when I still believed. My belief has died in layers; Velcro fastened to raw flesh and exposed nerves. So many names, so many offices. Dornan, Hayakawa, Cranston, De Concini, Gonzales, Waters, Conyers, Waxman, Paul, Kerry, Lee, McKinney... several committees. Too many doors. Too many layers. Hope fading. Lessons learned. In the early days these halls were crowded with lobbyists, citizens, pizza delivery boys, staffers, clerks, military personnel in uniform and mail deliverers. You had to talk above a normal voice to be heard by someone walking within five feet of you. When I was there this time, if you whispered or coughed at one end of a corridor, you could faintly hear it at the other end. Some of the corridors are more than 75 yards long. I found myself inherently walking silently, feeling as though I were in a library. I was grateful when anyone walked past me, smiled and tried to figure out who I was in the nice suit with cuff links. Cuff links are a secret symbol of power in Washington dress codes. Twice, outside two office buildings, tourists mistook me for Bob Barr. More irony. 9/11 really crimped things on the Hill, but just three months later, despite the fear and the security and the shock, there was still plentiful hall traffic, But this time almost four years later -- even though both houses were in session -- there was no blood flowing in the heart. Only at the Rayburn building, which houses many committees, public hearings and functions could I find anyone walking around. Still, even that traffic was light. I spent the whole day of June 20th on the Hill, from 9 AM until 5 PM. There were a few tourists at the tourist spots but little else. Even though any citizen can still walk these halls to visit members of the House and Senate unannounced, no one was doing it. Not even lobbyists. It was as though America had given up inside and out. The good news was that the bookstore closest to Capitol Hill had several copies of my book out but that didn't cheer me up much. At the end of the day today, July 1, I did a live African-American radio talk show in Philadelphia on WURD. We talked about drugs and the CIA. We talked about democracy; we talked about life as it is. That's what they want to hear in inner cities; about life as it is. I kept coming back over and over and saying that the Old BPP (Black Panther Party) had it right. They had the money figured out. They had the local solutions figured out. They understood the balance between legal violence and illegal violence in a way that was totally threatening to the establishment. It would have given them an equal footing had it been allowed to continue. The BPP had read the Constitution better than us white folks had. And they were brutally and heinously destroyed for it because they dared to live it in their own way as free men and women. Probably my favorite political quote of all time is from BPP leader Fred Hampton. - We get answers that don't answer; explanations that don't explain; and conclusions that don't conclude." At one point in the show I made the comment, "It may not be too long before us white people have to come ask you black people, "Say, can you show me how to do this slave thing?" If Washington DC is still alive then it has morphed and its lifeblood now flows in other locations and directions, through organs we are only beginning to divine and a brain that is too terrifying to imagine. What I saw was a corpse, rotting from the inside with only a few brave and valiant fools hanging in there just to see if they can do anything right before it's too late. I like fools. I identify with them. I'd like to say "Happy Fourth!", but, well, you know... Michael C. Ruppert
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halva
New Member
Posts: 15
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Post by halva on Jul 10, 2005 9:11:00 GMT -5
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Post by javelina on Jul 20, 2005 0:20:19 GMT -5
That "willyoujoinus" site is totally corrupt. Whoever did the code for it doesn't know what they're doing. Awful. I wouldn't bother with it, frankly.
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Post by EnviroEngr on Jul 21, 2005 21:49:04 GMT -5
That "willyoujoinus" site is totally corrupt. Whoever did the code for it doesn't know what they're doing. Awful. I wouldn't bother with it, frankly. I've personally gotten further with mypartytoo.com/discussion/posts.asp?Topic_ID=20 than I have with Chevron -- which is a bizarre irony in my simple-minded universe of small possibilities. I have tried 4 times now with entirely different names and email addresses on two machines with liberal cookie and privacy settings to get signed up and no dice yet. So I scratches my balding head and starts wunderin': Is this "Campaign" really what it says it is about itself or is it a front? In my July 19th Wall Street Journal, both pages A8 and A9 are dedicated to the "WillYouJoinUs.com" ad! That's a screaming 21 by 28 Full Color Inches of pure advertisement for this site. ¿Qué Pasa? That's a lotta $$$ On the other hand, in the "fronting" business, that's pocket change. So I really don't know what's up with this, and given the way the puppy is laid out... Oi Vei! Not Good! With a profit margin in the nine figures range, they surely could do better than that. It's essentially unusable even for those who can log in. I wonder if they answer their phones?
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Post by Wayne Hall on Jul 22, 2005 7:26:50 GMT -5
After much effort I did manage to get myself registered there.
The Chevron ads have been in the international press also.
I have asked them to fund a basic informational pamphlet in the Greek language.
I will let you know if that turns out to be within the range of their capacities.
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Post by Wayne Hall on Jul 22, 2005 7:34:46 GMT -5
How much oil do we really have? By Adam Porter In Perpignan, France How long can we go on pumping oil out of the ground? As oil prices remain volatile the markets do their best to forecast future prices. Unfortunately this is not an easy task. While it may appear extraordinary to outsiders one of the main problems in the oil market is the reliability of basic statistics. The oil industry calls the problem 'data transparency'. As an example this week is a 'revision' to oil demand growth in the United States in 2004. Previously the growth in oil demand was thought to be 2.4%, about 484,000 barrels per day. In fact it was 697,000 barrels per day or 3.5%. That is in fact 46% more than was previously stated - a huge revision. "Oil market data is generally a black art like using a set of chicken bones," says Paul Horsnell of Barclays Capital. "If Columbus had thought he'd hit India when in fact he was in the Caribbean, that's about the level of oil market data." "The revisions to US demand growth are small in percentage terms, they are generally 99% accurate. But the change is huge in barrel terms, and this is from the USA who have the best oil data in the world." "Suggestions that oil consumption will grow to up to 120m bpd by 2020 and that automobile and airline traffic will increase at extraordinary rates are futile and damaging" (Dr Michael Smith, Energy Files) The barrel difference was in fact 213,000 per day. Added up that is 77.75 million extra barrels per year, about one day of global production. "Oil data is like paint thrown across a canvas, you get the broad outline of the situation. But even then it's not just a Jackson Pollack painting, the paint actually moves of its own accord after it has been applied," says Mr Horsnell. Phantom reserves One of the major problems surrounding oil data is in reserves. CLAIMED OPEC OIL RESERVES Kuwait: 92bn (64bn) UAE: 92bn (34bn) Iran: 93bn (64bn) Iraq: 100bn (48bn) Saudi Arabia: 258bn (170bn) Claimed oil reserves, bn barrels 1990s/1970s These are the basins of crude oil that lie underground. They are either held by governments or the 'oil majors' like BP, ExxonMobil or Shell, or a combination of both. Many countries simply do not allow outsiders to audit the size of these fields. This is especially true of the major Middle East oil producers of OPEC and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Some believe that reserves stated by OPEC countries such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are not accurate. "There are a lot of questions to answer over OPEC reserves," says Bruce Evers of Investec Bank. "The quality of overall oil market data is poor, but with OPEC there remains considerable debate over the reliability of their reserve estimates." Sudden revisions One of the main reasons is that in the 1980s OPEC decided to switch to a quota production system based on the size of reserves. The larger the reserves a country said it had the more it could pump. The more it could pump the more money it could make. As a result in 1985 Kuwait revised its reserve estimates by 50% overnight. It was soon followed by United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Iraq. In 1988 Saudi Arabia became the last to join the revised reserve estimates party, adding a whopping 88bn barrels. Unexplained changes "Something needs to be done," says Mr Evers. "OPEC have never fully explained the reasons behind these changes, they have never issued any guidelines. The market needs to know." Although previous estimates may have been conservative, what troubles some analysts is that twenty years later, these reserve estimates are unchanged, in fact some have increased. Whilst it is obviously possible to add reserves by new field discoveries it can seem a perplexing situation to market makers. Kuwait for example still claim exactly the same reserve level as they had in 1985 despite pumping millions of barrels every day since then. Nor are company estimates any better, with Shell forced to make four revisions downwards of its official reserves since 2002, losing around 4.8bn barrels and damaging its share price. Unclear figures Even current figures for OPEC production are unclear. OPEC say they are producing exactly 28 million barrels a day (mbpd). This includes their latest 500,000 barrels per day increase announced at their last quarterly meeting by Kuwaiti oil minister Al-Sabbah. But OPEC have also admitted that their members break their own quotas to take advantage of high prices. So is it really 28mbpd? The International Energy Agency says OPEC pumped 29.3 mbpd in May 2005. The IEA say this is actually a fall from April 2005 of 55,000bpd. Who is correct? "There is no official OPEC output data," says Mr Horsnell. "they just kind of pass on the data they are given by their member countries. It is really not that easy for OPEC, you can't blame them, it is down to their members." Forecasting demand "I don't rate IEA data either," says Mr Evers. "they have horrendously underestimated demand in the past, it is one of the reasons we are where we are now. They are little more than a data collection agency, and the data they are given is already tarnished." It is no easier to forecast the future demand for oil, and analysts are growing increasingly sceptical of oil company attempts to do so. Energy Files director Dr Michael Smith said "it is no longer appropriate to accept glib demand forecasts from oil companies, financial institutions and governments, suggestions that oil consumption will grow to up to 120 million barrels per day by 2020 and that automobile and airline traffic will increase at extraordinary rates are futile and damaging." But Paul Horsnell says that gaps between data-sets can in fact show up areas of the oil market that need careful study. "Take Russian production as an example," he says. "There are all kinds of rosy forecasts and then there are people like me who think it's all rather bad news. But there are many reasons about why it is impossible to measure oil, it's a liquid for a start. "There are huge margins of error with oil data and it has to be treated as such. It's the nature of the product. Thinking you can measure it to the eighth decimal point, well, it's just a waste of time." As oil prices continue to soar, the lack of accurate data could make it harder for the oil market to predict its future direction.
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Post by javelina on Aug 2, 2005 0:40:09 GMT -5
1 August 2005
Dirty Oil: the West's Saviour, the Greens' Worst Nightmare www.rednova.com/news/science/192908/dirty_oil_the_wests_saviour_the_greens_worst_nightmare/
WATCH the "incredible, amazing, crazy-sensible" world of Honda's new hydrogen car marketing on television and you'll see weird cartoon rodents taking showers in squeaky clean water that pours from the car's exhaust. It's as if Honda has singlehandedly fulfilled every environmentalist's fantasy for a clean energy future: a car that plugs into your house, feeding off a hydrogen supply that also provides your lights and power.
So where can you buy this ecology-preserving wonder? You can't. Despite Honda's triumphant presentation of the first "fuel cell family" - Jon and Sandy Spallino and daughters last month took to the highways of California in their new Pounds 1m hydrogen Honda - the company won't have one for sale until 2020 at the earliest.
Hydrogen has been the fuel of choice for US energy futurologists and environmentalists since President Bush announced two years ago that he wanted children born then to be able to put their first car keys in a hydrogen car. Every big carmaker is working on hydrogen technology.
All the auto manufacturers have hydrogen prototypes and all the oil companies - Royal Dutch/Shell, Chevron, and even Exxon Mobil - have hydrogen programmes.
But even with the best will in the world, the hydrogen age is probably more than half a century away. Bjorn Skulason, managing director of Iceland New Energy, a Shell-sponsored project to turn Iceland into a hydrogen-only economy, says: "It will take at least 40-50 years before you replace everything with hydrogen," he says.
That means what powers the car of the future may not be hydrogen, as Honda predicts, nor biofuels, nor electricity generated from unsightly wind turbines, but yet more fossil fuels - and dirtier ones at that. The world's never ending need for energy is about to send the global oil companies in search of a whole new barrel of nastier hydrocarbons.
Last week, the oil majors were celebrating another embarrassment of riches - Exxon Mobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron and ConocoPhillips surpassed last year's already exceptional first half profits by xxx%, pulling in xxxxbn between them. In 2005, Exxon looks certain yet again set the record for the largest profit from a Fortune 500 company.
Yet their marketing all of a sudden has taken a downbeat turn. Chevron's latest campaign warns starkly: "One thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over." Exxon's is not much more cheery: "The world faces enormous energy challenges. There are no easy answers."
Some feel they are softening up consumers for difficult choices ahead. The oil industry is increasingly admitting that there are constraints on oil production. Exxon's latest energy outlook predicts that oil supply from outside the Opec cartel will peak as early as 2010. And Opec officials have privately warned that the cartel will struggle to produce the extra 20m barrels a day needed to meet projected demand by 2020.
So the companies are turning to so-called "unconventional" oil - oil sands and oil shales that exist in huge quantities at known sites. The US state of Colorado and Canada's Alberta have enough in oil sands and oil shales to thrust each individually ahead of Saudi Arabia's 263bn barrels reserves.
But here is the tough choice: developing these resources is an environmentalist's worst nightmare. Jeremy Leggate, the oil consultant turned Greenpeace activist turned solar entrepreneur, says: "It's suicidally dysfunctional behaviour. It's like putting your head in a paper bag and walking to the morgue. If they really do develop these things on a massive scale then we've had it."
But the world's energy needs suggest this will happen. David Greene an oil sands expert at the US government's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, says: "A transition to unconventional fossil resources is the path of least resistance and the way the petroleum market will go unless there are unexpected breakthroughs in other areas or major policy actions to prevent it."
What distresses environmentalists about uncoventional oil is the effort needed to extract it. Shell puts the world's largest diggers to work at its vast open pits next to the Athabasca River in Canada, gouging 100 metric tons of oil-soaked sand with every stroke. Each barrel of synthetic oil from oil sands generates roughly twice as much carbon dioxide during its production as a barrel of conventional oil and uses up the equivalent energy to one barrel of oil for every five produced.
GTL is similarly wasteful, with some 45% of the gas fed into a GTL plant lost in the process, making it nearly twice as polluting as burning the original natural gas.
Shell argues that its company-wide climate change targets mean that it can be relied upon to offset the extra carbon dioxide produced by oil sands with cuts elsewhere in the company and it is committed to return the land to the same state it was before the development began.
The environmental impact of developing unconventional oil is not the policy-makers' sole concern. Since the terrorist attacks on New York's twin towers nearly four years ago, another big concern - energy security - has shot up the agenda.
Unlike conventional oil, the majority of the world's unconventional oil deposits lie within the United States and Canada. If they were to be developed it would reduce US dependence on volatile Middle Eastern countries.
So unconventional oil and gas is where the money's going. Analysts at Deutsche Bank argued last year that, from 2008, almost half the opportunities for oil companies will be in liquefied natural gas (LNG), gas-to-liquids (GTL), and the Venezuelan and Canadian oil sands.
Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell and Chevron, alongside its partner Sasol of South Africa, have pledged upwards of $20bn to turn natural gas from Qatar's enormous North Field into diesel, and a further $13bn of potential Qatari GTL projects are being considered. Canada has recently seen some $36bn of new investments in its oil sands approved.
Oil sands and GTL are at the centre of Shell's plan to recover from its oil reserves crisis. It aims to be the world leader in the oil sands by the end of the next decade and to extend its dominance of the LNG market to GTL, which it pioneered with its Bintulu plant in Malaysia in 1993. It is also at the forefront of developing new technologies to improve the economics of coal-to-liquids and oil shales.
Shell plans to expand its Athabasca oil sands project to take it up to 500,000 barrels per day (bpd), and aims to produce 750,000 bpd of unconventional oil by 2014 - more than 15% of its production.
This summer, the US made its first moves to reappraise its vast reserves of oil shales, which have lain forgotten since the 1970s oil crash. A bill was introduced in the Senate proposing a "Strategic Fuels Task Force" which would develop a five-year plan to stimulate development of US oil shales through funding from the US energy and defence departments.
The chief advantage of synthetic oil, be it from sands, coalfields or gas deposits, is that it can be fed directly into the world's existing crude markets, refined in existing refineries, and sold through existing petrol stations.
Compare that with the transition to hydrogen, which would require untold billions spent on infrastructure. Petrol and diesel are among the most concentrated fuels available: running on diesel, a Mercedes can travel more than 1,000 miles on a 80-litre tank. Hydrogen, even when expensively liquefied, takes up about four times as much space for the same energy.
Adding in unconventional oil transforms the outlook for the hydrocarbon economy. Drawing on numbers by former Total geologist Colin Campbell, the high priest of oil supply pessimists, Greene argues world production of conventional oil will peak around 2015. But, as conceded by Campbell's colleague Jean Laherrere, adding in reserves estimates for so called "non-conventional" oil and gas of some 900m barrels doubles the amount of world oil left to be produced, potentially extending the peak for decades.
The energy minister of Alberta in Canada said earlier this year he was looking into upgrading oil sands reserves to 310bn barrels to reflect $50 oil. This would make the Canadian state the world's largest holder of oil reserves. The state presently estimates its reserves at 174bn barrels.
Greene's study of unconventional oil at Oak Ridge, "Running out of and into oil", predicted that, if environmental and labour constraints could be overcome, Canada's oil sands could surpass Saudi Arabia's present production, producing 14m barrels a day of oil from 2030 and maintaining the same level of output for 20 years. The 1.8 trillion barrels of oil in the US's Green River deposit - known locally as "Saudi Arabia in the Rocky Mountains" - could produce 20m barrels a day by 2050, according to the report. Its production could even reach 40m bpd, more than is presently produced by the entire Middle East.
The greens pin their hope on doubts about whether oil sands could be developed on the massive scale envisaged in the Oak Ridge report.
Charles Mattenet, strategy director at Total, argues: "You need technology to do it and it's quite expensive, you need adequate manpower and also the whole production system provides a lot of CO2. Until you can solve that, I don't think it's possible.
The Oak Ridge study admits that even to reach the 5m bpd that Canada is targeting for its oil sands production by 2030 will require overcoming water shortages, attracting and housing enough manpower, and finding enough gas to power the process. Total predicts only some 2m bpd will come from Canada's oil sands by 2015, and dismisses Canada's claims to hold 180bn barrels of oil sands reserves, arguing only 70bn-100bn barrels should count as economic.
When Total and Royal/Dutch Shell committed to developing Venezuela's Orinoco heavy oil belt and the Athabasca sands at the end of the 1990s, it was brave move. The production is only profitable at some $25, and at the time the oil price was hovering above $10. Even now, not everyone thinks it is a bet worth making. BP has ignored unconventional oils, arguing it can make more money investing in conventional production elsewhere. Albert Bresson, Shell's head of forward planning, told The Business: "If Saudi Arabia says 'we are open for business, 20m barrels per day is no problem', we will stop developing unconventional oil."
With the price of oil hovering around $60 a barrel, developments like these are probably inevitable. Mattenet says: "The beauty of heavy oil projects, like LNG and GTL, is that you have a very long production plateau and don't have a decline like you do in offshore fields."
GTL plants don't make much economic sense at less than a $20 oil price, either. But the diesel produced is a ready-made high performance fuel, so pure, advocates argue, that you could drink it without coming to much harm. It can either be sold as a premium ultra-clean fuel, or mixed into standard diesel to bring sulphur levels within legal limits and boost performance.
CTL would only really make economic sense at $40 oil, making it far too risky an investment for a private company to pursue without some kind of guarantee from the government. But this could be something governments with huge coal reserves and worries about energy security - namely the US, China and India, are willing to do.
Total, Shell and others, are working on ways to develop oil sands and shales using less water and less energy. Shell, through its Mahogony project, is looking at heating the rock underground rather than mining it first, a technology it estimates could allow light oil to be produced for $25-$30 a barrel within five years. Producing oil this way would mean burning the energy equivalent of one in every three barrels of oil produced: even dirtier than oil sands. But Shell's chief executive Jeroen van der Veer told The Business at last week's results: "The world still needs oil and gas," he said. "So it's important that a company like Shell does a serious job." Another company could do it - and I don't have a specific name in mind - but not care about the environment."
Exxon Mobil chief executive Lee Raymond argued in a recent interview with Petroleum Intelligence Weekly: "What is unconventional oil today will be conventional 20 years from now. That's the evolution of technology."
Honda may have its first hydrogen car on the road, but given the potential for a new hydrocarbon age, the chances are its engineers won't be around long enough to see it sell its last diesel.Source: Sunday Business; London (UK)
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halva
New Member
Posts: 15
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Post by halva on Aug 15, 2005 5:10:08 GMT -5
The Peak Oil thesis has been encountering resistance, including on ‘the Left’ because of those with memories of the oil crisis of 1972 and the unanimous scare-mongering of the media of that time that ‘we are running out of oil’. In 1972 the factors behind the crisis turned out of course to be political, not factors of resource availability. Now we are hearing the same stories again, not from the mainstream media but from the margins. Mainstream the tendency is to attribute today’s oil price rises to stock exchange speculation, profiteering by distributors, Iran and its ‘weapons of mass destruction’, anything but Peak Oil. There is a common element in both scenarios: the ‘international community’s’ love of, indeed addiction to, deceit. W.H., Athens PEAK OIL – imposed by nature
A film by Amund PrestegardSPO is a network of concerned scientists predicting a world-wide energy crisis of unprecedented proportions.
They are working to raise awareness of the serious consequences this will have for Mankind.
But vested interests and other forces have done their utmost to prevent the information from reaching the public consciousness.PEAK OIL – imposed by nature As we move beyond the age of oil and beyond the economy which is driven by the age of oil we enter an entirely new world and there really frankly are no experts anywhere who can come forward and say exactly what we do in this situation. It’s entirely new to everybody’s experience. There are no investors who can say: ‘This is a good investment in this situation.’ There are no politicians who can say: ‘This is how we should behave in this situation.’ Even in a humble business way there is no business that can plan its future, because every single aspect of its future is going to change. And so we are left with a sort of vacuum. Ballydehob, IrelandYeah I suddenly got a call. I remember the day. An American voice said: ‘Dick Haynes here. Office of U.S. Naval Intelligence.’ And he said: ‘I’m by the phone box.’. So my son-in-law was with me and we walked down the hill here, got to the phone-box and there was nobody in sight. Nobody there at all. And I looked around looking for this person. Dr Colin Campbell Petroleum geologist, world wide experience from Texaco, BP, Amoco, Fina Chairman of ASPO And then across the road I saw a man standing with dark glasses and a hat. Standing like this just sort of looking around like this. Didn’t react, didn’t say anything. Just looked. And I walked across to him and said: ‘Are you looking for me?’ And he said; ‘No, but those that are are in the shop opposite.’ And so I came over to the shop….And it was this shop here, inside which was a man about fifty with two women. And he was effusive and said ‘Hi, hi, nice to see you,’ and everything. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ So we walked up the road to Cochlan’s Bar up here, followed behind by the man in the dark glasses. It was a scene from a movie, you could say ----- We know who you are. We watching what you’re doing. We’re very interested in what you’re doing. That’s a sign that he’s on to something. Michael C. Ruppert Investigative Reporter www.fromthewilderness.comAnd the way such things work… I know because I’ve been in this for twenty- five years and I’ve had several contacts like that in twenty-five years, some a lot less pleasant… is that: It’s also telling you – ‘You’re on to something. And in a way it’s saying: keep going. Because we want to know where you go and what you find out. What they also very much want to know…The primary interest of CIA, let’s say, is not whether Peak Oil is real or not. It’s how close is the ASPO to penetrating the public consciousness with the issues of Peak Oil and how close is the public to acknowledging what it is going to meet. ----- Federal Office of Energy Workshop February 2004What matters is when production will begin to decline. That is the devastating turning point facing the modern world, which runs on oil. I doubt that today there is any real spare capacity anywhere. And probably another price shock is building right now. We’re already going through the thirties. It may trigger a new deeper recession, which may in turn dampen demand and take the pressure off price. These vicious circles give a volatile few years before the decline sets in and is perceived as such. President BushIt’s important for our country to understand, and I think most Americans do, that we import over half of our crude oil stocks from abroad. And sometimes we import that oil from countries that don’t particularly like us. Puts us at a…jeopardizes our national security. To be dependent on sources of energy from countries that don’t care for America, what we stand for, what we love. Mike RuppertMy position is that everything that’s happened since 9/11 is, and including 9/11, is a result of Peak Oil. It’s caused by Peak Oil because they know that it’s coming. According to the map that I’ve made….I’ve made all these predictions and they’ve been proven correct. Dick Cheney called this a war that will not end in our lifetimes. And by October/November of 2001 after 9/11 I was saying: ‘This is a war that will be a sequential war to control the last remaining oil reserves on the planet. And it will go from Afghanistan/Pakistan, where there are natural gas pipelines and oil pipelines and the central…the Caspian Basin. It will go to Iraq. It will go to Saudi Arabia. It will go to West Africa. It will go to Colombia. And that’s exactly the way the map is unfolding. Colin Campbell Stavanger, NorwayHello there. Well, back in Stavanger. I first came to Stavanger in 1980 and I was exploration manager of Amoco then. Really the early days of the North Sea in Norway. Those prolific source rocks laid down 150 million years ago. A very unique epoch in geological history and we began to understand this. We could map where it was. And we began to find the giant fields. And the peak of discovery in the North Sea as a whole was 1973. Of course at the time we didn’t realize that. We thought we were on the brink of something that would go on forever. You have to find oil before you produce it so, although the discovery had peaked, the production was still rising from these early finds. And in terms of production, which is really the only element that anyone takes note of,.the real peak didn’t arrive until about now. The U.K. has now gone over the top – in 1999 – and now is declining at about 6% a year. And Norway is going to follow the same pattern. It’s over the top, just about now it’s at the top. So that Norway’s production is set to fall by about a half within ten years.. And I’m so pleased in a way to see that the Norwegian government, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, now accepts this. They plot graphs showing this exactly. We are now in a situation where our tools to understand what is under the surface in the sediment basins are dramatically improved, but we are finding less and less. Olve Torvanger Petroleum geologist, seismic expert with world-wide experienceColin CampbellThis is a dying industry. Olve TorvangerPeak Oil is something that was introduced by Professor Hubbert, where he claimed that after fifty percent of a resource is produced it would be impossible to increase the production further and then, after half of the resource is produced you will get reduction whatever efforts you set in to produce the remaining reserves. Colin CampbellAnd if our world was limited to Norway, and of course many people working in Norway, the only place they do know is Norway…. But gradually you see the same picture unfolding in one country after another. And slowly we’re beginning to get this global view of things that, well, everywhere you turn to is facing sooner or later the same pattern that has already happened in the United States: discovery peaked in 1930, production in 1970. It’s now extremely mature. Production is falling. And nothing can change it. And so when we look at the world as a whole, it’s simply made up of these component parts and we find that the peak of discovery for the world as a whole was in 1964 and that by around 2010 - you can’t put an exact date on it but it depends on consumption which in turn depends on demand and recession - but generally speaking around 2010 the world reaches its top and after that production has to start falling, and it cannot be reversed. It just falls forever and ever and ever. And it falls I would guess at between two and three percent a year. --- The conventional wisdom in markets is that a) oil is going to run out in the year 2100 therefore it doesn’t matter when it runs out to the last drop. What matters is what happens when there is less tomorrow than there is today? Richard Webb financial risk analystWhen a market reaches an extremity you tend to get a volatility at the top. And basically one of the things that we’ve seen in the last two or three years in the oil market particularly is that even the slightest amount of production being shut down, maybe 50,000 or 100,000 barrels of oil due to a tropical storm in the Mexican Gulf, this is having a disproportionate effect on an energy market where we are consuming possibly the equivalent of a hundred and fifty, a hundred and sixty million barrels of oil a day. In my experience, in my opinion from working for some of the largest investment banks in the world, when we see this kind of behaviour in markets it would tend to endorse what Colin Campbell and the ASPO are basically saying, that we are near the peak.
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halva
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Post by halva on Aug 15, 2005 5:13:01 GMT -5
If you look around in the world you’ll get reports from here and there. If you stay tuned to the daily reports that reserve estimates are being reduced
Aage Figenschou Simmons & Co International
And these are the first small signs that we are reaching a kind of peak
Richard Webb ‘How are you?.’
OK. Probably not the best car to be shown on camera.
Are you ready’
Richard Webb I’m ready, yeah.
If you sit down and think of the number of people involved in supplying your everyday needs and where they are located, it’s obvious that the world economy is inextricably linked. Everybody is dependent on each other. Therefore a shock in one part of the system will be transmitted to other parts of the system. So I think it’s very….maybe they feel that it’s too … you know, we can’t do anything about it or it’s not our problem…,,,but it is their problem and, you know, no-one is independent in the global market. Everybody has bought into the same concept and anybody who tries to make a stand and not be in that system is……their companies, their assets, their competitiveness…is punished.
Colin Campbell What we’re facing is the beginning of the decline. And what is so interesting out of that is that from our mindset today, everybody is used to growth. We all live on the expectation of growth. We expect our salaries to rise. We expect everything to grow around us, as it has done in the last fifty years. And this growth in the past has been made possible by the cheap energy that has been available. And now we face a change.
Richard Webb When we start the transformation process from where we are and where we’ve got to go, we will see massive competition between companies as they realize the energy productivity miracle they can embark on..how they can save, or use the resources they’ve got in a more efficient, productive way. A company that embraces that is going to see its share price heighten in value. A company that ignores the consequences is going to find that it simply goes out of business.. Its share price will be trashed out…
London
Demand Respect
Peak Oil, and the implications it has if we haven’t prepared for it are… in particular if you think that it’s an event that might be happening now or two or three years from now, or even ten years from now, is so utterly serious for our society that it’s my opinion that if global warming gets placed three on a scale from one to ten, this is at twelve.
Matthew Simmons Oil man and CEO of one of the world’s major energy investment banks
We have no spare capacity. We have no way to address basic spare capacity. And demand is now a runaway train. Which means it’s growing too fast and it’s not slowing down at all because of the oil prices. And so demand is just about to exceed supply, and supply will always equal use.
We need to face the possibility that we will have to give a much larger role to government,
Chris Skrebowski Editor, Petroleum Review, London
that government will find itself almost in a wartime situation in which it is going to have to allocate resources, in which it is going to have to ration it out. Which in turn means that they have got to decide which uses would have priority and which uses wouldn’t. The prime function of any government is to provide security in the land and so obviously both the military and the police would have to have prior access to fuel. You cannot simply let the price mechanism bid the price higher and higher. Because you would bankrupt the state if you did that.
Matthew Simmons I have probably spoken out on these issues as much as anybody on earth in the last couple of years, and so if I weren’t concerned about it I certainly wouldn’t be doing all the speaking I have and so often being deemed to be just utterly pessimistic, utterly controversial , and I’m just basically trying to tell you, these are energy facts as I know them. If we understand, you know there’s an interesting definition if you look up the Oxford English Dictrionary about what the word ‘crisis’ means. The word ‘crisis’ is a series of problems that went unattended until they became terminal.. I actually think that the faster we open our eyes to these problems, the faster we start doing something about them, the less painful the problems will be. And they don’t need to basically destroy our society. But if we actually leave them unattended then they will.
The United Kingdom Parliament House of Commons
David Chaytor, Member of Parliament And this is our first speaker meeting on the theme of oil depletion And the purpose of our meeting is to raise the profile of the energy crisis and particularly argue the case for much stronger government policy in terms of energy efficiency.
Colin Campbell in the House of Commons Without a source there is nothing to find, no matter what technology you exploit. Unless you’ve got something to find, you obviously won’t find it. Now the world, I suggest, has now been sufficiently explored to know more or less where all the sources are. Remember that all company accounts tacitly assume the business-as-usual supply of cheap energy on which their business depends . Well, it isn’t going to be there much longer. And the financial community now does indeed begin to wake up. You’d be surprised how many banks are in touch with me these days.
Colin Campbell Yes, well it was successful to the extent that it happened at all, and I suppose about twenty or thirty MPs came. And there was a positive reaction. But the Minister himself did not come, evidently being warned that this was a subject it was better not to be publicly associated with. On the other hand Michael Meacher, the previous member of Blair’s government, was there, and was very enthusiastic. And you find that politicians out of office are able to understand and react positively, but those in office are more cautious and if one was generous one could say that they understand very well the situation but find it politically impossible to exactly come out and describe it, for fear that the statement might cause the panic which they are working to prevent.
Richard Webb There is a direct link between population growth, energy consumption and economic activity, so if the available supply of energy is constrained, this has consequences for economic growth. But population trends will carry on for quite some time after basically the energy supply starts to struggle to meet demand. So that will exacerbate the situation further.
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halva
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Post by halva on Aug 15, 2005 5:15:06 GMT -5
Colin Campbell We’re not talking about something a hundred years off or some speculation or some, you know, some sort of doomsday story because the facts are now in front of us, and it’s coming quite soon. And I think what is perhaps more interesting than the event itself is the perception of it coming. We don’t have to ask much about that. Look at the Middle East. You know, these famous weapons of mass distraction that Bush and Blair said they were going after, well…nobody’s found them…I don’t think anybody thinks they exist. So, what was the motive?. And, nobody would doubt that it was oil. So already we are seeing indirect reflections of this growing perception of this dramatic situation that is unfolding.
Aage Figenshou Simmons & Co. International I do believe, based on existing reserves, a certain skepticism regarding the politically adjusted Middle-Eastern reserves and some of the expectations to find oil in peculiar places, I do think we are getting to when we have extracted about half the accessible oil and that we reach a peak ..But that doesn’t imply queuing up at gas stations all day. It just means that there will be an upward press on prices all the time.
And in the worst case, seen from an environmental point of view, there will be a change towards coal. In many places like China, there is an abundance of coal.
It’s not a positive thing, rather a negative thing, when we get to that point.
Colin Campbell You see this shell here. This is the limpet. Facella is its scientific name. That shell is not changed for 500 million years. This little limpet discovered a happy way to live on the rocks that was sustainable. The waves washed over it. It found enough to live on. And it was happy.
But some descendants of this limpet found a friendly pool to live in. They became sophisticated. They changed. They became extraordinarily successful. They proliferated. They grew and they grew and they were very very successful in this little pool.
Until suddenly geological conditions changed, the climate changed and the pool dried up. Now these sophisticated descendants didn’t find out how to go back to the simplicity of the little limpet. And they died out. They died out.
One could say that Darwin didn’t wear a watch. He understood evolution and he understood the survival of the fittest. This concept has a huge impact on the way we live today. But since he didn’t wear a watch, he didn’t take into account the time factor. Who is successful for a moment, a short span of time, is different from he who is successful in a long period of time. One can say that even in today’s world of invasions and battles and wars, sure, you can win a battle, but do you really win a war. This is something we can ask ourselves these days.
Aage Figenschou Energy is the oxygen to the modern society so you won’t find any enterprise of a size you can invest in that isn’t highly dependent on energy,
Richard Webb The travel industry, the airline industry, these people will be the first to feel the pinch. When it affects transport, when it affects the price of moving goods, it’s going to feed through the whole system.
Colin Campbell It’s no use if you suddenly come in and raise the price of oil, arbitrarily, then people will react, and they’ll feel cheated, and they’ll feel resentful, and there will be demonstrations, which we’ve already seen. If on the other hand you were able to explain to people that this was not a conspiracy by oil companies or governments or OPEC or the Middle East but was simply a feature of nature, then I think people would be much more sympathetic to the situation. They would not demonstrate in reaction, and do their best to contribute in some useful way.
The use of oil varies enormously from country to country. In America, for example, on average, each person consumes as many as twenty-seven barrels. If you look at the other end of the scale you’ll find that the Indians use less than one barrel. So there is a huge range between the affluent West and the so-called Third World. But, given the fact that the West now depends so completely on this flow of cheap energy, and it is depleting, and depleting fast, the people who suffer most are in fact going to be the Western countries, the big consumers. The Indians can go on more or less forever living with their way of life, because they’re not dependent upon it.
The whole economy, the whole financial system, is built on growth. That’s how it functions. The assumption of growth. And so to turn that around in the financial sense takes a lot of adjustment, a lot of work, a lot of thought. To find a new system that will match the reality that is imposed by nature.
With many thanks, in deep respect to Colin Campbell and Matthew Simmons, probably the most important ‘whistle blowers’ of our times.
If only, now. those in power might show a similar courage. …we have zero time!
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Post by javelina on Aug 16, 2005 21:28:36 GMT -5
Don't get me wrong - this is a very informative thread and it's useful to have these excellent articles in one place. (Thanks, Wayne.)
I have to say this, though: Why am I feeling like we're all watching a video of ourselves watching a video of ourselves watching life as we know it falling apart?
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halva
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Post by halva on Aug 23, 2005 2:03:24 GMT -5
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Post by EnviroEngr on Aug 24, 2005 18:54:28 GMT -5
I tend to agree with Jim Kunstler: August 1, 2005 [glow=limegreen,1,1300] We begin this ominous month with the curious case of Daniel Yergin, who won the Pulitizer for his 1992 epic history of the oil industry, The Prize, later turned into a PBS megadocumentary. Since his big score, Yergin has set up a public relations firm called Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) which, in the spirit of the PR profession, seems to have become the main disinformation organ for its clients, the major oil companies. In a piece published in yesterday's Washington Post, Yergin takes the position that there is no problem with the global oil supply. Over the next five years, he says, both OPEC and non-OPEC producers will come up with an extra 16 million barrels a day, taking the world from its current 85 m/b/d to 101 m/b/d in 2010. This will happen, he says, because of "new technology" used to exploit unconventional sources of oil such as tar sands, ultra-deep-water developments, and natural gas liquids. More than a few elements of Yergin's pitch are shifty. The slyest one is that he does not mention that unconventional oil tends to be very uncheap, and since it is cheap oil that enables America's "non-negotiable" easy motoring way of life, and the debt-fueled suburban sprawl-building economy that has evolved to serve it, there may indeed be a problem further along in the pipeline, so to speak. Yergin also leaves out the fact that most (and perhaps all) of the world's major conventional oil fields are past peak and now depleting at between three and twenty percent a year -- and, ironically, as in the case of the North Sea, the more advanced the drilling technology, the more efficiently the oil is recovered, the greater the rate of depletion. The big question mark, of course, is Saudi Arabia, which until recently was believed to be years short of peak. A new analysis by Matthew Simmons, chief investment banker to the US drilling industry, and author of the just-published Twilight in the Desert, concludes that Saudi Arabia is peaking now. Simmons adds that the Saudi's 50-year-old super-giant Ghawar oil field (from which SA gets more than half its crude) has been structurally degraded by aggressive over-production and by the practice of injecting sea water into the geological strata in order to keep the pressure up in the wells. Saudi oil reserve figures have been guarded as "state secrets" since they nationalized their industry in the 1970s, so nobody, including Mr. Yergin, knows for sure what is left under the desert. But we do know what is coming out of the Kingdom in its tankers, and despite repeated promises to increase production in order to goose down prices over the past year, the Saudis have failed to do so. This we know. Among the other things Yergin's rosy analysis leaves out is that oil is inequitably distributed among the nations of the world. It is a generally accepted fact that roughly two thirds of the remaining oil lies under the Middle East, and another substantial fraction is in Central Asia. That is to say, it belongs either to people who hate us, or to landlocked countries on the farthest side of the globe (next door to China). Another significant pool (though past peak) belongs to Venezuela, run by Mr. Hugo Chavez, who remains irked by American attempts to overthrow his regime and have him bumped off. These facts ought to give pause to the confident. The conclusion that a reasonable person might draw is that the West, and America in particular, is liable to have trouble getting its mitts on all the oil it needs, and that the industrial nations altogether are headed straight into a fateful geopolitical scramble for whatever's out there. That's exactly why we are in Iraq, by the way. It is our central forward base to secure Middle East oil supplies. And it also why we have embarked on the somewhat crazy and dubious project of setting up bases in several former Soviet republics. (Kyrgystan has just asked us to pack up and leave.) A great game is underway and the patriotic steroids that America has been taking since 9/11 are no guarantee that we will end up the winners. Along these geopolitical lines, we note today the death of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. Fahd had been disabled by a stroke for years, and the Kingdom has been effectively ruled during this time by his half-brother Prince Abdullah, who now becomes king. Abdullah himself is 82 years old, and whatever his abilities have been, he would not now seem destined for a long reign. What follows Abdullah --with Arabian oil entering its arc of depletion, and the kingdom's oil welfare disbursements shrinking among an exploding population, including a large number of unemployed, futureless, non-royal angry young Arabian men occupied in the study of a militant wahhabism -- may be a very turbulent chapter in the history of that region. These are the things that Daniel Yergin's public relations escort service to the oil industry doesn't want to talk about. By the way, the price of oil this morning: $61.02 a barrel as I close. [/glow] www.kunstler.com/mags_diary14.html{line/text-wrap touch up (removed blockquote, etc.); EE}
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Post by Wayne Hall on Aug 26, 2005 8:37:42 GMT -5
I've just finished reading Yergin's 'The Prize'.
Currently I'm inclined to believe that both sides of the Peak Oil debate are politically-motivated.
But Yergin is definitely an official-disinformation man.
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