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CERA vs. Peak Oil: it's getting serious
John Kingston, Platts
We wrote the other day about criticism leveled at Cambridge Energy Research Associates' relatively optimistic view of world oil supplies from followers of the Peak Oil theory. The latter group has now thrown down the gauntlet.

The size of the bet offered up to CERA is $100,000, and the base for it is the question of whether global oil supplies will actually rise by 2017, as CERA projects, or peak and begin to decline by then. The challenge came from members of the association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO), and also challenged CERA to a "public debate on the issue of peak oil."

CERA's annual conference, with thousands of attendees, is scheduled for Houston next week, and the ASPO release said it was prepared to debate the issue at that conference, or some other time.

In what looks like a dig at CERA's trustworthiness, ASPO said that to call the bet, CERA "must match" the group's $100,000 letter of credit from National City Corporation, a Cleveland, Ohio-based financial holding company.

As Platts reported, ASPO's bet is based on a production threshold in 2017 of 107 million b/d, a figure the group extrapolated as a ratio of actual production to estimated production capacity.
(7 February 2008)

Oil crisis ahead? 'Peakniks' build for future
Asher Price, Austin American-Statesman
If the day comes that oil grows so scarce that Austinites can't afford fruit hauled in from California and brownouts roll across Texas, Lester Germanio will live high, wide and cool in his West Lake Hills villa.

Germanio and other Austinites who have banded together to trade information and survival tips are preparing themselves for what they see as inevitable deprivations as oil production declines past its peak. Some call them "Peakniks."

Germanio's half-finished, 2,800-square-foot limestone home, called FoodWaterShelter, clings to a hillside off Terrace Mountain Drive. When completed, it will be powered largely by solar panels, provide all his water needs out of a 40,000-gallon cistern that will be filled by rainwater, cool him with old-fashioned ventilation and shade, and feed him from greenhouse gardens fertilized with fish droppings.

"The only way to beat them is not to need them," Germanio, a 55-year-old architectural engineer, said of the oil and other fuels that he blames for what he calls resource wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

His maneuvers are more sophisticated than duck-and-cover, but the anxiety is not dissimilar: As the anticipated peak oil crisis unfolds, Peakniks foresee a period in which the U.S. would devolve into the stone age. The economy would tumble; cars, even hybrids, would be useless; day-to-day goods would be hard to come by.

Recently, the peak oil movement got a shot of legitimacy from an unlikely source: the head of Royal Dutch Shell.
(10 February 2008)
Long, sympathetic article.

State plans to cut fossil fuel use
Brisbane Courier Mail (Australia)
The Queensland Government is to draft a plan to cut the state's demand for fossil fuels as the oil price rises and supplies drop.

Sustainability Minister Andrew McNamara said the head of General Motors recently said world oil production had peaked and the head of Shell Oil said the supply of easily accessible oil would run out within seven years.

"These are voices the world can't afford to ignore," said Mr McNamara, who completed a report on peak oil before his appointment as a minister in September.

Peak oil refers to the time when global oil production declines due to natural exhaustion of the resource.

Mr McNamara will be in charge of developing an oil vulnerability mitigation strategy and action plan.
(9 February 2008)
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