Exploration

Rob Hopkins writes: "The new absolutely brilliant Transition Network website is here!!" The site’s goal is to support the Transition Towns movement with reliable community-owned information about the most important elements of the movement: the initiatives, projects and people.

-US EPA chief concerned about gas drilling fluids
-Europe the new frontier in shale gas rush
-The true cost of shale gas production
-The Natural Gas Shopping Spree Quickens

The world is heading for a renewed oil crunch as soon as 2013 due to shrinking production capacity and growing demand in the emerging markets, according to reports from two investment banks. Both BofA Merril Lynch and Barclays Capital conclude non OPEC production is close to peak, meaning a shift back to reliance on OPEC for new capacity...

Oil supply optimists claim that new technology combined with private development of the world's remaining oil resources--most of which are now under the control of government-owned companies--would vastly increase global oil production and put off any decline for decades. Texas oilman Jeffrey Brown isn't buying it, and he cites the history of oil production in Texas and the North Sea to explain why.

New information prompts another look at the global supply of lithium, used in renewable batteries, and a major choice for use in the batteries of electric vehicles, such as the Chevy Volt.

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.

At the moment it seems like everyone wants a piece of Angola. The queue of prominent visitors is long with the USA’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at its head. Where it smells of oil one can also find China ... The international oil companies are trying to maximize oil flows from Angola’s deep water fields where production is very expensive. This means that production from these fields will lie on a plateau for some years before the usual very rapid decline begins. If we look into the future this will mean that Angola will reach Peak Oil before 2030. According to Colin Campbell they will reach peak production in about 10 years.

This week saw the Chairman of one of the world’s major oil companies publicly acknowledge the approaching peak in oil production...

I don't expect any government agency to issue a regulation requiring a warning label on oil and natural gas discoveries. But the next best thing would be for journalists reporting such finds to put them into perspective using a days of world consumption figure, or if the find is natural gas that will only be marketed domestically, days of domestic consumption.

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

In a commentary published in The Times this week to coincide with the Copenhagen climate talks, Fatih Birol, Chief Economist of the International Energy Agency wrote that on existing energy demand projections “the world faces the prospect of a peak in conventional oil production in about 2020...

Henry Ford is famous for having once said, "History is more or less bunk." He was, in fact, attacking tradition in an age of rapid technological and social change. Almost a century later we have a less ambitious observation which may not achieve the broad visceral appeal of Ford's statement, but one which may turn out to have a good deal of importance, to wit: Oil and natural gas reserve numbers are more or less bunk.

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.

At turning points most market observers and participants are of the same mind. That doesn't mean the bear market in natural gas can't continue, perhaps for quite a while yet. But the idea that gas will remain cheap and plentiful for decades because of technological breakthroughs sounds too good to be true, and it probably is.

Oil prices rose this week breaking the $75/barrel mark for the first time this year. The gains were mainly fuelled by rising equity prices and a falling dollar...