Peak Oil News

You may not remember this, but in the early 2000s — in the aftermath of the dot-com bust — the price of crude oil dropped to $12 a barrel... before going on an epic ramp-up to $147 in the summer of 2008. The question everyone asked was, "Why did the price of oil climb so high, so fast?" The answers are obvious: emerging market demand, global liquidity bubble, a falling dollar, and decelerating production. In other words, the Chinese are buying cars; people used their house as an ATM to buy SUVs; the currency printing presses ran in overdrive; and ExxonMobile ran out of cheap, easy to find oil. But while that much is clear, what's not so easy to understand is why — after a brief dip a year ago into the $30 range propagated by margin calls on hedge funds — the price of oil has...

I spent most of the day in Richmond yesterday attending the first Summit on Virginia's Energy Future. I'll write more about the main topic of that session next week, but a statistic from one of the panelists stuck in my mind for the entire drive home. In describing the risks that utilities take on when investing in new power plants, the President and Chief Nuclear Officer of Dominion Virginia Power, David Heacock, explained that over the sixty year life of such a facility, the cumulative difference between their high and low long-term natural gas price forecasts amounted to $7 billion, equivalent to the entire up-front cost of a nuclear power plant. He also suggested that the value of the difference between their high and low forecasts for the price likely to be imposed on CO2 emissions wa...

A couple of months ago I conceded that I was probably overly optimistic when I periodically pointed out that our problems fell short of reprising the 1970s. While I haven't heard anyone describe our current condition as "malaise", there does seem to be little optimism in the US these days. Perhaps one reflection of the country's sour mood is the growing fashionability of proclaiming that we are falling behind in the race to develop renewable energy or clean technology, as the Secretary of Energy apparently did in a speech on Monday. Yet when I looked at several of the examples he cited, it was not at all clear that we are lagging. Much depends on how we define the competition, and I would respectfully suggest that doing that in a way that makes our situation look worse than it is might jus...

There's an energy war going on... and it's been raging for decades. The Middle East, North Africa, Ex-Soviet States... all have witnessed turmoil because of their massive energy reserves. And in each of those regions — amid the turmoil — fortunes have been made. From the oilfields of Iraq to the gas fields in the former U.S.S.R., billions have changed hands as nations jostled for energy supplies to fuel growing economies. Now though, the global picture is changing... Developing countries are entering the race for energy and the destination of the finish line is constantly changing. AdvertisementUranium is Old News The future of the nuclear industry is beryllium. One company has just pioneered a new nuclear fuel additive - called beryllium oxide - that can prevent Chernobyl-like dis...

Dismal. That's how I've been describing natural gas prices lately. Then again, did you really think prices were going to jump? The last EIA inventory report showed a lower-than-expected decline. Even though demand rose modestly over the last several weeks, the 116 Bcf drawn from U.S. working storage was still viewed as a bearish sign. Analysts were expecting a larger draw of approximately 132 Bcf. As you can see below, prices recovered slightly during the fall and winter seasons: The question now is whether the momentum that natural gas gained during the last seven months is lost or not. Unfortunately, things aren't looking much better over the short term. Believe me, I'd like nothing more than to tell you that all our troubles have passed and it'll be smooth sailing from here...

The current scuffle between the US Congress and the wind industry began last fall with reports of a large wind farm in Texas involving both Chinese investors and Chinese wind turbines. It ratcheted up last week, with four key Senators proposing to close the "loophole" that enables renewable energy projects built with imported hardware to receive stimulus funds. The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) promptly retorted that the problem wasn't the wind projects and their suppliers, but a lack of consistent renewable energy policies coming out of the Congress. The more I've thought about this situation, the more I am convinced that both parties to this tiff are missing the bigger picture.Let's start with the response by AWEA, which used the occasion to reiterate their consistent support f...

Welcome to Energy and Capital's Weekend Edition — our insights in investing, as well as the top stories this week from Energy and Capital and our sister publications. This week marked the anniversary of a very special event for investors. One year ago, the oil markets bottomed out. Of course, it was a much different environment back then. Crude oil was trading for almost half of what it is today, and nearly every energy company was trading near (or had already reached) 52-week lows. Chances are you were squeezing your eyes shut on a daily basis, too. Some of us, however, didn't see the barrel as half empty. I remember telling my readers that many of those beaten down oil and gas stocks were a screaming bargain at the time. You know the rest of the story... Stocks across th...

When oil crossed $120 a barrel for the first time in May 2008, oil cornucopians knew they were in trouble... Prices had quadrupled in just five years, yet had failed to bring new production online. Regular crude had flatlined around 74 million barrels per day (mbpd). The case for peak oil was looking stronger with every new uptick in crude futures. The following month, prominent peak oil critic and cornucopian Daniel Yergin of IHS-CERA changed his stance: The peak oil threat would be neutralized by peak demand. Gasoline consumption had peaked in the U.S. and Europe, he argued, due to the combined effects of increasing efficiency, biofuels, and the recession. In 2009 the peak demand story seemed confirmed, as prices stabilized around $70 in June, and U.S. consumption remained well off it...

An article in today's Financial Times (registration required) raises a worrying possibility concerning the plans of the US and other oil-consuming countries to rely on biofuels for an increasing fraction of future fuel needs. What if oil-producing countries took those plans seriously and reduced their investment in new oil capacity, on the assumption that it wouldn't be needed? In some respects, that's exactly what we have in mind. However, if biofuels then failed to materialize in sufficient quantities to fill the gap between oil supply and total fuel demand, or proved to be economically or environmentally unsustainable, then we might inadvertently create precisely the sort of crisis these efforts were intended to avert. It would be easy to dismiss this argument as OPEC-inspired propagand...

You love investing in energy. You wouldn't be here if you didn't. And as you know, I love it, too. I love it because it's crucial for everything we do — and I mean everything: cooking breakfast, taking a shower, turning on the lights, driving to work... But that's just personal energy use. We rarely think about the energy needed to raise the livestock and grow the vegetables we eat, the energy used to transport them or to make all the goods we use. That's why energy is such an exciting investment field. There are so many ways to produce it, and so many companies to watch. And it spans the entire globe. AdvertisementMoney Talks... Bullsh$# Walks! If you're not averaging at least one double-digit gain per month in the Alternative Energy Market... Click here now... And start cashi...

More and more, Peru is becoming one side of a study in contrasts that has Venezuela at its other end.The Peruvian government says that electricity prices have declined by 30% in recent years, due to encouragement of foreign investment in the country's natural gas infrastructure. The results of that government approach are primarily visible in the Camisea extraction and pipeline project in central Peru that came online in 2004. Now, Camisea is delivering greater supplies of hydrocarbons by the year. In October 2009, the Ministry of Energy and Mines predicted that a World Bank-funded expansion of the Camisea pipeline would boost throughput capacity 43% by the end of 2010. Domestic demand, not exports, are the priority, even though President Alan Garcia is also targeting major liquefied natu...

Today's Wall St. Journal includes a very interesting article on the real-world competition between wind power and electricity generated from fossil fuels. At least in Texas, steadily increasing wind generation has apparently come mainly at the expense of natural gas, rather than displacing coal-fired power, as might have been anticipated by many wind advocates. That has implications for the effectiveness of renewable energy policy as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as for the utilities and independent power generators that are complaining that wind has been given overly-preferential treatment.Texas makes an interesting laboratory for demonstrating the practical consequences of our shift towards renewable energy. ERCOT, the Texas grid, has little connectivity with neig...

One year ago, it was a buyer's paradise. Last March, oil was trading at a dismal $45/barrel. Nearly every oil stock you followed had been crushed. (Believe me, I was suffering just as much as you were.) And it's sad to say, but that price felt infinitely better than when crude prices fell to $32 per barrel in December 2008... Yet no matter how depressed we were watching our stocks crash alongside oil prices, I told you our day would come. At the time, I said that investors have two options: They could either play the field or sit on the sidelines. You know how the story played out over the next twelve months... Our stocks rallied while crude prices rebounded — and here we are today, with oil comfortably trading at $70-$80 per barrel. I've said before that trading last March w...

The price of oil is an odd thing. It's watched by millions of people every day, especially when it reaches uncomfortable levels, yet no two observers agree on all the details of how it's determined. Having traded the stuff professionally, I've always given a lot more credence to the fundamentals of supply and demand than to the influence of speculators as the main driver of day-to-day price movements, though it's clear that both supply and demand are pretty complex constructs in their own right these days. For some time, however, I've also been intrigued by the extent to which current oil prices seem to be affected by their own history, something more in keeping with behavioral economics than the kind I learned in grad school. When I consider all the factors converging to yield this mornin...

This month brought another exciting piece of news for those of us hoping the US will transition to renewable energy in the years ahead. Not only did the US add a record amount of wind capacity in 2009, but new data show that the potential supply of wind power is almost infinite relative to our electricity consumption. The US government agency that deals with renewables, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), finally updated their study of onshore wind resources (since the last comprehensive study in 1993). They now estimate that wind power can provide nine times the amount of electricity we currently use in the United States. Wind Tech Advances Quicker Than Fossil Energy Tech Many fossil energy advocates who ignore the harmful global warming effects of burning oil and natural gas...

Welcome to Energy and Capital's Weekend Edition — our insights in investing, as well as the top stories this week from Energy and Capital and our sister publications. Let the see-saw continue to go back and forth, up and down, as more investors throws their hands up in utter confusion. For more than six months, traders have seen crude prices rock back and forth between $70 and $80 per barrel. Sure, there are a few days that oil prices make a run to $85/bbl, or briefly dip below $70/bbl, but never for long... And lately, news of economic growth has bulls confident that crude contracts will make a run over $81 a barrel next week. Oil Trader Phil Flynn isn't convinced: "I guess the question you have to ask yourself if you are bullish is, 'Why?' The China demand numbers are suspe...

The last time I gave serious thought to Colombia, I was wearing red pants and white socks. My stereotype ideas were formed by a mixture of Miami Vice, the movie Romancing the Stone, and historical documentaries of the Medellín drug cartel. Colombia, as most of us "know," is a third-world hellhole where the rich ride around in bulletproof cars and have bodyguards to protect their families. Cocaine warlords rule the country, buying politicians and killing judges and prosecutors with impunity. But like most stereotypes, things aren't what they seem... AdvertisementA $700 million wind energy project that hardly anyone knows about could land you a 112% gain in the next 4 months. Click here for more. In fact over the past ten years, the Colombian forces of law and order have made...

A small start-up company just launched an amazing new product to much fanfare: a novel fuel cell device capable of running on natural gas and potentially small enough to fit in your basement and power your entire home, replacing the electricity you buy from the grid. That proposition looks so compelling that builders will start incorporating them into new houses, so that the cost of the fuel cell would be absorbed into the mortgage a buyer takes out, making monthly power bills a thing of the past; you just pay your mortgage and your gas bill. Would it surprise you to learn that I'm not describing the "Bloom Box" fuel cell featured on last Sunday's "60 Minutes", but rather a home fuel cell designed by a small company in upstate New York called Plug Power Inc. in the late 1990s? Plug Power i...

The Roma (or Rroma) of Italy are probably the poorest fraction of the residents in the country. They normally live in segregated camps, in trailers or in self built sheds. Only about half of the 150,000 Roma in Italy are Italian citizens; in most cases, they have no stable job and live a very precarious existence as the target of hatred and of open racism. The image above, from Excite Magazine, shows the Roma camp in the suburb of Ponticelli, in Naples, as it was before being burned to the ground by an angry mob in 2008. Here I am, in front of the whole class. Romani men and women; about 20 people; all coming from the same camp, nearby. They are in their late 20s and early 30s, and they have dressed up for the occasion. Not that they can afford expensive clothes, of course, but the men...

The February 2010 edition of Oilwatch Monthly can be downloaded at this weblink (PDF, 1.24 MB, 33 pp). Figure 1 - EIA World Crude Oil Production January 2002 to November 2009 The Oilwatch Monthly is a newsletter that is available free of charge with the latest data on oil supply, demand, oil stocks, spare capacity and exports. A summary, subscription form, and latest graphics below the fold. Subscribe to receive Oilwatch Monthly by e-mail Latest Developments: 1) Conventional crude production - Latest figures from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that crude oil production including lease condensates increased by 283,000 b/d from October to November 2009, resulting in total production of crude oil including lease condensates of 73.22 million b/d. 2) Total liquid fuels pro...

Life is full of unintended consequences, and the energy industry is currently dealing with a significant one related to the step-change in US natural gas reserves and production made possible by exploiting gas resources locked up in deposits of a sedimentary rock called shale. The very success of these efforts has placed a decades-old, widely-used drilling technique called "hydraulic fracturing" at the center of a major controversy. In fact, it's hard to find references to fracturing (often called "frac'ing" or "fracking") that don't describe it as a "controversial drilling practice." As best I can tell from delving into the technology involved, the controversy around fracking is largely an artificial one, though that hasn't deterred Congress from holding hearings on it or introducing legi...

Unlike the usual blog post here, I just want to share a couple of links to some good articles from a couple Ivy League alumni magazines. The first is a great story on the East Coast Greenway – with a special focus on the New England route – in the Harvard Alumni Magazine entitled, Eisenhower 2.0. The second is a quick mention of the East Coast Greenway in an article on climate mitigation efforts on Princeton University's campus. Enjoy!

This morning's Wall St. Journal featured a front-page article on small-scale nuclear power, highlighting how reactors a tenth the size of current commercial designs could significantly reduce the financial risks associated with these mega-projects. This is one example of the need to think in new ways about scale when addressing our energy challenges. In his talk at this year's TED conference in Long Beach, Bill Gates offered another surprising perspective on scale: "All the batteries we make now could store less than 10 minutes of all the energy [in the world]," he said. Framed between those two examples is the basic proposition that while solving our energy problems may require breaking them down into more manageable pieces, they must still add up to mind-numbingly stupendous sums.Accordi...

TIGER grant to create unified regional trail system in Pennsylvania & New Jersey Pennsylvania/New Jersey, February 18, 2010 – The East Coast Greenway (ECG) is about to get safer and more accessible throughout the Philadelphia region thanks to significant support from the US Department of Transportation (DOT). On Wednesday, $23 million was awarded to complete numerous sections of the ECG through the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grants program. The federal stimulus grant will create jobs and improve the quality of life throughout the region. East Coast Greenway Alliance Executive Director, Dennis Markatos-Soriano, remarked, “The Department of Transportation made a great choice today. Not only will this grant create and save around 1,000 jobs, bu...

Since the publication of the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) last November, we've been inundated with news reports and opinion pieces questioning the scientific consensus behind climate change. An editorial in today's Wall St. Journal on "The Continuing Climate Meltdown" is just the latest example of this trend, following a weekend that saw the release of a remarkable BBC interview with the CRU's former director. The fact that all this coincides with a northern hemisphere winter that has deposited record snowfalls on regions that don't normally see much of the white stuff serves to reinforce the message that something is amiss with global warming theory. It has also had me wondering if I moved far enough south, as I cope with "ice dams", cabin...

"Dirt" (2008) by David Montgomery deals with the relation between soil erosion and civilization collapse. It is neither the first nor the only book that examines this subject. It is, however, written by a soil scientist, and it brings to a deeper level the understanding of how soil disappears and how this affects agriculture and, in turn, society. Was the Roman Empire doomed by the loss of fertile soil to erosion? This is a much discussed point that I also examined in a study of mine on the fall of the Roman Empire. Fertile soil generates food that, in turn, causes population to increase and that is what makes an empire able to expand, as all empires do. But fertile soil is also subject to overexploitation. It is fragile; is easily washed to the sea by rain. And, when it is gone, it t...

The topic of space exploration has gotten much media attention lately, mainly focused on the uncertain fate of future US manned space efforts in light of the cancellation of NASA's Constellation program in the administration's new budget. After the current flight of the shuttle "Endeavor" and the four remaining shuttle missions this year, the fleet will be retired and transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station will depend on Russia, or on unproven spacecraft from commercial start-ups like SpaceX and Blue Origin. Yet without diminishing the importance of these concerns for our long-term access to space, yesterday's delayed launch of the Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite deserved more attention than it got. The SDO mission is part of NASA's "Living with a Star...

This is a guest post from Erica Thompson, formerly with the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC Report) and now working on a PhD at Imperial College, London. She attended the ITPOES report launch on our behalf. Today's (10th Feb 2010) launch of the second report of the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES) was rather more high-profile than the previous one. After summaries of the report from other contributors, Richard Branson arrived late to read out a short speech and media interest (informally measured by the rate of camera flashes) picked up; we can expect a scattering of news stories about the report to follow, in the usual places. As we reach maximum oil extraction rates, the era of cheap oil is behind us. We must plan for a world in which oil prices are likely t...

When the first flakes of the second major snowstorm in less than a week began to fall on Northern Virginia, it occurred to me that I might not be in a position to post for a couple of days. I had intended a longer posting covering all the topics mentioned in a renewable energy conference call that I dialed into yesterday, but then I've written previously about most of them. The call was hosted by the American Wind Energy Association and its sister trade associations covering hydropower, biomass power, geothermal energy, and solar energy, for the purpose of laying out a joint "2010 Outlook for Renewable Energy," recommending a national renewable electricity standard (RES) along the lines of the Renewable Portfolio Standards already in place in a number of states. The groups also released a...

In London this morning (10th February 2010) the UK industry task force on peak oil and energy security launched a new report warning of the dangers of the forthcoming oil crunch. On 10 February 2010 at the Royal Society, six UK companies - Arup, Foster + Partners, Scottish and Southern Energy, Solarcentury, Stagecoach Group and Virgin - joined together to launch the second report of the UK Industry Task-Force on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES). The report, titled “The Oil Crunch - a wake-up call for the UK economy�, finds that oil shortages, insecurity of supply and price volatility will destabilise economic, political and social activity within five years. The Task-Force warns that the UK must not be caught out by the oil crunch in the same way it was with the credit cr...

In addition to a pair of well-matched teams and a sufficient dose of fourth-quarter suspense concerning the outcome, yesterday's Super Bowl was the first in several years to feature an ad meriting comment in an energy blog. The subject of the ad was the new Audi A3 TDI clean diesel car, which was recently named "Green Car of the Year" for 2010. I was intrigued by the ad's tagline of "Green has never felt so right", positioning the car as painlessly green. Having had the opportunity to drive one at the recent Washington Auto Show, I can attest that the A3's environmental credentials come wrapped in a very attractive package, requiring no sacrifice other than the sticker price. Even if the comparison to a variety of intrusive green practices lampooned in reductio ad absurdem fashion may have...

The recession was supposed to slow down white-hot renewable energy growth. A lack of financing and tax equity was to reduce the wind and solar markets as much as 50% in 2009. Instead, last year brought new records in capacity additions. Wind power in the US grew 9.9 GW (almost 40%) to extend the US lead as top producer of wind power globally. And while robust solar numbers won't be available until March, many analysts predict that the solar market definitely grew in the US and probably throughout the world. Global Growth Shines The global wind power market also grew at an astounding rate — clocking a 37.5% growth rate in its annual market (37 GW vs. 27 GW in 2008). China's annual growth became the biggest in the world at 13 GW, which makes sense due to their larger electricity demand gr...

Yesterday the administration issued an important set of new rules and proposals relating to energy, mainly dealing with expanded biofuel production and the biomass supply chains that must be developed to sustain it, as well as addressing carbon capture and storage (CCS.) There's far more here than I could cover in one posting, so I've chosen to focus on the EPA's finalized Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) rules, which were first proposed last May and have been the subject of intense study and considerable controversy ever since. While the print edition of the Washington Post characterized these as "A boost for corn-based ethanol" I'm not so sure. In the process of laying out a roadmap for how new corn-based ethanol facilities can contribute to the expansion of biofuel in the US, the EPA effe...

After reading several articles about the administration's proposed 2011 fiscal-year budget, I decided to look through the figures myself. My primary interest was in finding indications of what might lie in store for energy-related taxes and incentives. However, once I noticed how the projected deficits accumulate and examined the assumptions behind them, it struck me that the larger concern for energy and everything else is whether this budget represents a reasonable and sustainable picture of our future national finances. The expected 10-year deficit for the 2009-2018 period appears to have grown by $1.5 trillion relative to last year's budget. And that's after counting roughly $2 T in newly-proposed spending reductions and tax increases, including higher taxes on the energy industry. Aga...

Recent statistics have been published showing that Europe has now installed over 2,000MW of offshore wind capacity, with more than a quarter installed in the past year, and lots more to come in the next few years. I discussed these numbers in more detail here, but wanted to give you here some insights on what these numbers mean on the ground. Left: Offshore wind installations. Source: EWEA - The European offshore wind industry key trends and statistics 2009 (PDF) )Right: Transition pieces for the Belwind offshore wind farm, Zeebrugge harbor, 22 January 2010 I recently visited the port site in Zeebrugge, Belgium, where the foundations for the Belwind offshore wind farm (the financing of which I worked on) were stored before their installation. This is a good opportunity to give you a glimp...

A spate of articles on China over the weekend, including one in the New York Times entitled, "China Leading Global Race to Make Clean Energy" got me thinking about our reaction to such reports. The Times article included some important insights about the role of relative scale and growth rates in fostering the emergence of global wind and solar power competitors from China. From a wider perspective, however, I worry that we're beginning to apply the same kind of mental inflation of competitor attributes that made "Japan, Inc." seem such an overwhelming juggernaut in the late 1970s and most of the 1980s, when it appeared that Japan would dominate every important industry and own every scrap of signature US real estate, starting with Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach. In the last decade...

Given the central focus of this year's State of the Union Address on the economy and jobs, I wasn't surprised to hear the President highlight "clean energy jobs"--a phrase that seems to have replaced the formerly ubiquitous "green jobs"--though I was relieved that he didn't hang the whole weight of his administration's jobs focus on them. I was even more pleased at the apparent evolution and broadening of his perspective on energy, compared to his first address to a joint session of Congress last February, when oil was only brought up in the context of its imports, and nuclear power wasn't mentioned once. By contrast, last night the President spoke of the need for expanding nuclear power and "making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development." If he is...

This is a guest post from Selene Rebane. She is from Estonia, has a degree in journalism and recently graduated from an MSc in International Relations from University of Bristol. She's particularly interested in energy issues in Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Nord Stream (also known as the Baltic Pipeline) stirs emotions in Europe. Nord Stream route (EEZ = economic exclusivity zone). The plans to build the politically and environmentally controversial Nord Stream pipeline have been in the air since 1997. With Finland and Sweden finally saying “yes� to the pipeline in their waters, the wheels of construction are now in full speed with the first line to be opened in the 2011. This will bring relief to Europe that is struggling with energy s...

Yesterday provided one of those occasional treats that makes blogging about energy so enjoyable. In conjunction with the Washington Auto Show, I had the opportunity to drive a demonstration version of the eagerly-awaited Chevrolet Volt around an impromptu test track, accompanied by the Volt's Vehicle Line Director, Tony Posawatz, who answered every question that occurred to me and many that didn't. The experience was exhilarating. For a bona fide car of the future the Volt--even in "pre-production" form--looked and handled like a real car that I could imagine myself driving around town or on a long trip, aside from its impressive technology and efficiency. That's an important distinction, since to be truly successful the Volt and its eventual siblings must be able to compete beyond a niche...

I was surprised by a headline I saw this morning: "Brazilians Call for Cut to 20% Ethanol Import Tax." At first I thought this referred to the US duty and tariff on ethanol imports, the repeal of which Brazil's President Lula has suggested to his US counterpart on more than one occasion. Instead, it seems that Brazil has had an ethanol import tariff of its own all along--who knew?--and today's call from Brazilian sugar trade association Unica stems from the recent weather-related shortfall in cane production that reduced ethanol inventories in Brazil and led to the government's temporary cut in the required ethanol content of gasoline from 25% to 20%. This situation illustrates a couple of energy lessons that don't quite square with the usual, overly-simplistic interpretation of Brazil'...