Peak Oil News

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 ...

Leading players in the petroleum industry, including Saudi Arabia and Exxon Mobil Corp., are aggressively arguing that plenty of crude oil remains for world consumption, in an effort to counter critics who contend crude output is about to plateau. That argument, known as the peak-oil theory, has provided intellectual backing for the boom in crude prices and sowed doubts among some policy makers about crude's long-term reliability as an energy source. Such doubts, coupled with concern over sky-high prices, have added impetus to the search for oil substitutes--including in Washington, where President Bush this year declared the U.S. "addicted to oil" and sparked a boom in interest in ethanol. » Source: Mail Tribune Some in the industry now are keen to fight the threat posed by such fears. Tuesday, Abdallah S. Jum'ah, chief executive of Saudi Arabian state-owned Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil ...

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 ...

The world has tapped only 18 percent of the total global supply of crude, a leading Saudi oil executive said Wednesday, challenging the notion that supplies are petering out. Abdallah S. Jum'ah, president and CEO of the state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known better as Aramco, said the world has the potential of 4.5 trillion barrels in reserves - enough to power the globe at current levels of consumption for another 140 years. Jum'ah challenged oil ministers and petroleum executives at an OPEC conference in Vienna to step up exploration "and leave the minimum amount of oil in the ground." » Source: The Jerusalem Post "The world has only consumed about 18 percent of its conventional potential," Jum'ah said, contending that should lay to rest fears that the world is in danger of being tapped out within a few decades. Many experts ...

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 ...

China will reduce its reliance on petroleum imports by basing its energy supply on coal and developing new and renewable energies, said a senior official with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) on Tuesday. China successfully reduced its net imports of petroleum last year, said Zhang Guobao, vice minister of the NDRC at the 7th Sino-U.S. Petroleum & Natural Gas Forum held in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province. According to Zhang, China's oil consumption was 317 million tons last year, down slightly from the previous year and its net imports of petroleum are 136 million tons, less than that of 2004. » Source: People's Daily Online The Chinese economy has maintained a growth of over 10 percent for three years running so it is normal for China to see a rise in its ...

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. ...

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 ...