Peak Oil News

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 ...

World oil demand was weaker than expected in the first half of 2006 because increasingly efficient use of oil is limiting consumption despite economic growth, OPEC has said in a monthly report. "World oil demand growth in 2006 has been revised down by 0.1 million barrels per day (bpd) since the last MOMR (OPEC monthly report) to stand at 1.2 million barrels pr day," The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said in its September report on world oil markets. "Recent data shows weaker-than-expected demand in the first half of the year," OPEC said Friday. » Source: Yahoo News Gasoline demand in the United States "grew by only 0.7 percent, well below the annual average of 1.6 percent despite the stabilization of gasoline prices. "This has led to downward revisions of 0.2 million bpd and 0.1 million bpd to second- and third-quarter oil demand figures for North America," the report said. "Developing Countries, which account ...

In its need for more fuel to supply an expanding economy, China is pursuing a dynamic "holistic" approach to energy partnerships in Africa that has surprised many Western competitors, says South African Warrick Davies-Webb. Davies-Webb, political analyst at Executive Research Associates, a risk-management consulting firm headquartered in Pretoria, South Africa, spoke at a September 13 briefing sponsored by the African Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS), a U.S. government agency located at Fort McNair near downtown Washington. Established in 1999, ACSS sponsors seminars and training sessions for African midlevel military officers and defense officials. It recently opened an office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to oversee programs on the continent aimed at increasing the professional skill of African militaries while building closer ties with U.S. counterparts in the defense community. » Source: US INFO With oil, gas and coal use far ...

A slowing US housing market and the possibility of a major oil supply disruption were two of the biggest risks to the world economy, International Monetary Fund (IMF) head Rodrigo de Rato said yesterday. Speaking at an Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) conference in Vienna of policy makers and oil executives, he underscored the importance to economic growth of stable oil flows. Moves by some oil-producing countries to raise taxes on international oil groups or change contract terms could lead to their rebound by cutting investment. » Source: Business Day “With the housing market in the US cooling faster than anticipated, there is a risk of an abrupt slowdown in the US which could derail the global expansion. “There are clear signs of increasing risks,” De Rato said, referring to global growth. “Adequate investment in the oil sector will help alleviate ...

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 ...

EurActiv has seen a draft of an ambitious energy-efficiency plan to be unveiled by the Commission that includes a binding target to slash fuel consumption in cars. On 22 June 2005, the Commission tabled a 'Green Paper' on energy efficiency, outlining a series of ideas which it said could save Europe some 20% in energy consumption by 2020 and slash its energy bill by €60 billion every year. EU member states have highlighted housing and transport as the sectors where the savings potential is greatest. But they insisted that the EU adopts realistic and wide-ranging measures such as soft law, product labelling, support measures, certificates and voluntary agreements. » Source: EurActiv Issues: The Commission will tell EU countries that they can cut their energy bill by €40 billion annually from 2012 if they follow the recommendations of an energy-efficiency action plan to ...

Urbanization is one of the dominant demographic trends of our time. In 1900, 150 million people lived in cities. By 2000, it was 2.9 billion people, a 19-fold increase. By 2007 more than half of us will live in cities—making us, for the first time, an urban species. In 1900 there were only a handful of cities with a million people. Today 408 cities have at least that many inhabitants. And there are 20 megacities with 10 million or more residents. Tokyo’s population of 35 million exceeds that of Canada. Mexico City’s population of 19 million is nearly equal to that of Australia. New York, São Paulo, Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Delhi, Calcutta, Buenos Aires, and Shanghai follow close behind. » Source: Earth Policy Institute Cities require a concentration of food, water, energy, and materials that nature cannot provide. Concentrating these masses of materials and ...

Canada's oil production dropped in 2005 for the first in six years as conventional supplies wane, but that should change as oilsands operations continue their rapid ramp-up. According to a Statistics Canada report released Monday, companies pumped out 858 million barrels of crude last year, down 2.3 per cent from the year before. One of the key reasons for this drop was a major fire at Suncor Energy (TSX:SU), which cut production at Canada's second largest oilsands operation in half for three-quarters of the year. "In general, this occurred mostly because of lower output from the conventional sector as well as unplanned interruptions in the non-conventional sector," the statistics agency said. » Source: CBC News With Suncor's operations repaired and producing more than pre-fire levels, Canada's oilsands production hit a record 1.2 million daily barrels earlier this year, ...

For decades, the conventional wisdom about developing energy projects in the U.S. has been that "big" always meant cheaper, and therefore better, projects. This produced what has become our modern centralized electric power system fueled primarily by coal, natural gas and nuclear power. In the mid-to late 1990s, however, the electric power industry began to hear concerns, particularly from the environmental community, about the negative environmental consequences of a system based too heavily on these types of power. As a result, a second wave of thinking arose that called not just for producing the cheapest power at any cost, but also for finding ways to produce cleaner energy from renewable sources such as the wind, sun, biomass, water and geothermal heat -- and to do so on a scale large enough to become a significant portion of utilities energy portfolios. » Source: ...

One of the hazards involved in energy analysis is placing too much emphasis on raw data, like the kind one finds in the U.S. Energy Information Agency’s weekly and monthly reports. While rawness may be a desirable attribute in certain meats and vegetables, it is less desirable in statistical information that is susceptible to errors requiring a correction at some later point. It is even more exasperating when the changes are significant enough to warrant junking a hypothesis that explained the earlier results well but doesn’t fit at all with the newly redrawn picture. The latest example of this recurring pattern occurred this week when EIA released a compilation of supply and consumption data from January through June this year. In that statistical summary, EIA reported that demand for gasoline inched up by 0.6 percent from the year-earlier period. But in the weekly reports, EIA’s estimates of increased demand had been ...