Tar sands

-Money spent on tar sands projects could decarbonise western economies
-China's oil demand increase 'astonishing', says IEA
-OPEC sticks to its guns, demand rising

-Saudi Arabia Says Peak Demand for Oil Is an ‘Alarm’
-Virgin's Richard Branson takes on peak oil
-Oil groups mount legal challenge to Schwarzenegger's tar sands ban

One way of looking at our current set of predicaments is that we've been on a binge, consuming energy considerably faster than it can be captured and stored by Earth's ecosystems. While fossil fuels once appeared limitless (and still do to deniers of peak oil), and though we're literally bathed in energy (in the form of sunlight), the disappearance of the fossil-fuel storehouse accumulated over millions of years isn't something that can be replaced with anything nearly as convenient as fossil fuels.

Peter Tertzakian has a double education in geophysics and economics and is "Chief Energy Economist" at a Canadian energy investment company. His book "A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Breakpoint and Challenges facing an energy dependent world" was published in 2007, but was, based on the contents of the book, presumably written up around 2005.

Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, is not your typical economist. He gets peak oil...And now, in his bestselling book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, he argues that oil prices, temporarily dampened by the deepest post-war recession on record, will soon be vaulted to new highs as the economy begins to recover, which in turn will thrust the world into yet another recession right on the heels of this one.

A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and Production
-Venezuela
-China continues to grow
-Quote of the week
-Briefs

-Conoco, Total to expand oil sands project
-Shell faces shareholder revolt over Canadian tar sands project
-Alberta to study pace of oil sands growth

A weekdly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Record Asian demand
-The Alberta oil sands
-Quote of the week
-Briefs

-Ed Miliband: China tried to hijack Copenhagen climate deal
-Carbon Supplicants on the Copenhagen Pilgrimage
-Review of the Year 2009: Climate change
-How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room
-There's No Negotiating With Nature
-BC Fossil of the Decade Awards
-Copenhagen's failure belongs to Obama
-Clear-Cutting the Truth About Trees
-Doom and Gloom
-Mammals May Be Nearly Half Way Toward Mass Extinction

"as mankind proceeded to get bigger and bigger we silently crossed a threshold"

Canadian energy authorities have done it again. They missed their last rosy projection of future oil sands production, so they issued a new one: they merely pushed the big surge in production 5 years into the future.

-Approaching peak oil
-Copenhagen talks could leave oil industry with a sinking feeling
-IEA forecasts stir debate
-The peak oil debate: 2020 vision

We cannot be lulled into a false sense of security: though oil prices have declined from their historic highs, there is little doubt that peak oil is real. A 2008 research project completed at Washington University in St. Louis found strong evidence in support of the theory. Please feel free to circulate this academic document as a primer on peak oil.

George Will had quite a few figures in his commentary “There is still no alternative to oil” that suggested there are no supply problems concerning oil. I think there are a few more figures that should be added to assess the oil supply situation.

John Michael Greer has officially established himself as an institution within the peak oil community. Truly one of the finest minds working on the predicament of modern-day industrial civilization, he is so well-read in so many fields that he regularly gains access to insights that utterly elude his contemporaries. For this he is treasured by a growing number of loyal readers—and, I suspect, hated by equally many fellow bloggers who wish that they could be half as good.