Peak Oil News

Ice defines the Arctic. It determines what exists, and how. It shapes the region's culture and history. It's highway, birthing ground and hunting platform. It's what tourists clamour for, and artists strive to paint. It has helped to forge Canada's identity as a cold, northern nation of strong, resourceful survivors. It is disappearing. In Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut territory, locals report the harbour was clear nearly a month early this year. At the wharf, an Inuit family, tying up after a four-day hunting trip, say they'd seen no seal. The animal needs ice, and the ice was long gone. » Source: TheStar.com Northern temperatures were 2.5C above normal this summer. The ice cap that floats on the polar ocean is now 14 per cent smaller than in 1978, and 20 per cent thinner than the four-decade average. The Arctic will continue to deep freeze ...

The melting of the sea ice in the Arctic, the clearest sign so far of global warming, has taken a sudden and enormous leap forward, in one of the most ominous developments yet in the onset of climate change. Two separate studies by Nasa, using different satellite monitoring technologies, both show a great surge in the disappearance of Arctic ice cover in the last two years. One, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, shows that Arctic perennial sea ice, which normally survives the summer melt season and remains year-round, shrank by 14 per cent in just 12 months between 2004 and 2005. » Source: Independent Online The overall decrease in the ice cover was 720,000 sq km (280,000 sq miles) - an area almost the size of Turkey, gone in a single year. The other study, from the Goddard Space Flight Centre, in Maryland, shows that the perennial ice melting rate, which has averaged ...

Gasoline is composed of many different hydrocarbons. Crude oil enters a refinery, and is processed through various units before being blended into gasoline. A refinery may have a fluid catalytic cracker (FCC), an alkylate unit, and a reformer, each of which produces gasoline blending components. Alkylate gasoline, for example, is valuable because it has a very high octane, and can be used to produce high-octane (and higher value) blends. Light straight run gasoline is the least processed stream. It is abundant and cheap to produce, but it has a low octane. The gasoline blender has to mix all of the components together to meet the product specifications. There are two very important (although not the only) specifications that need to be met for each gasoline blend. The gasoline needs to have the proper octane, and it needs to have the proper Reid vapor pressure, or RVP. While the octane of a ...

Polar bears are drowning and receding Arctic glaciers have uncovered previously unknown islands in a drastic 2006 summer thaw widely blamed on global warming. Signs of wrenching changes are apparent around the Arctic region due to unusual warmth -- the summer minimum for ice is usually reached between mid-September and early October before the Arctic freeze extends its grip. "We know about three new islands this year that have been uncovered because the glaciers have retreated," said Rune Bergstrom, environmental adviser to the governor of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago about 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole. Source: Yahoo News The largest is about 300 by 100 meters, he told Reuters. On a trip this summer "We saw a couple of polar bears in the sea east of Svalbard -- one of them looked to be dead and the other one looked to be exhausted," said Julian Dowdeswell, head of the ...

Of all the many aspects of the predicament of industrial society, the peak of world petroleum production will likely have the most drastic impact in the short and middle term. Now it’s true, of course, that plenty of other resources are also running short worldwide, from topsoil and fresh water to dozens of minor but economically important minerals. In the latter days of a system designed and built to pursue the delusion of infinite material growth on a finite planet, shortages are inevitable, but no other globally traded commodity is as central to the world’s industrial economies as oil, or faces so imminent and irreversible a decline. » Source: The Archdruid Report Thus the end of the age of cheap oil promises a sea change in the world’s economies and societies as significant as the beginning of the fossil fuel age some three ...

High oil prices are still being propped up by a shortage of refinery capacity and there is little sign of the bottleneck easing until 2010, industry executives and officials discussing OPEC's future have warned. That potential respite relies on the unlikely prospect all 66 refineries planned by oil companies and producers being built, as well as a total of about 300 billion dollars in investment by 2015, they added. "The need for downstream capacity is just as important as other issues," said Claude Mandil, executive director of the International Energy Agency at a two-day conference which was continuing Wednesday. » Source: Middle East Online "There is a general recognition now that no spare capacity in refining together with no spare capacity in crude production are the key factors we have to manage on high prices," he added. Mandil said: "If everything goes ...

Arctic sea ice in winter is melting far faster than before, two new NASA studies reported Wednesday, a new and alarming trend that researchers say threatens the ocean's delicate ecosystem. Scientists point to the sudden and rapid melting as a sure sign of man-made global warming. "It has never occurred before in the past," said NASA senior research scientist Josefino Comiso in a phone interview. "It is alarming... This winter ice provides the kind of evidence that it is indeed associated with the greenhouse effect." » Source: Yahoo News Scientists have long worried about melting Arcticsea ice in the summer, but they had not seen a big winter drop in sea ice, even though they expected it. For more than 25 years Arctic sea ice has slowly diminished in winter by about 1.5 percent per decade. But in the past two years the melting has occurred at rates 10 to 15 times faster. ...

The fight for space on Spain's beaches looks set to grow fiercer over the next four decades as the sand starts to disappear under a rising sea that also threatens to flood beach-side homes, according to a Spanish environment ministry report. Spain's beaches are expected to shrink by an average of 15 metres (50ft) by 2050 as global warming causes sea levels to creep up while stronger waves and currents eat away at the coastline. In some of the worst hit resorts, unprotected beaches could vanish altogether while salt water washes into holiday homes, the authors warn. » Source: Guardian Unlimited "I wouldn't buy a house in La Manga," said the report's coordinator, Professor Raúl Medina, referring to an area in the south-eastern region of Murcia popular with British holiday-home buyers. "It is a bad investment because I doubt that my ...

Relax! There's plenty of oil left in the ground. By 2030 conventional fossil fuels will still account for 80% of the world's energy requirements. At least that's the view espoused by Mark Nolan, chairman of Exxon-Mobil Australia. It is also the view of the US Department of Energy. Now I'm not here to promote conspiracy theories, only to promulgate them. FN Arena attempts only to be an objective news service, providing food for thought. Lord knows I get into enough trouble for suggesting central bank gold price manipulation (based on the evidence collected by others), but then I'm lauded on the other side of the fence. It is with the credo of objective journalism in mind that I have delved into the great Peak Oil debate. » Source: FNArena Put very simply, supporters of the peak oil theory believe the world's supply ...

The curtain will fall on North Sea oil production by 2012 if not enough is done to maintain development and exploration, according to a forthcoming report from the Offshore Industry Liaison Committee (OILC). The report, due out by the end of September, will reignite the debate on depletion rates in the North Sea. The OILC report will claim that while in the short- term there has been a slow-down in the rate of decline, from 17% in April to 8% in August, the long-term outlook is that the rate of decline will be established at 17% by 2007/2008 without significant increases in investment. » Source: Sunday Herald The report draws its figures from real-time metre readings from production rigs and updated data from reserves analysts – which claim that significant features of the geology of the region will result in less oil being ...