Peak Oil News

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 ...

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, ...

The discovery of potential deep-water oil and gas reserves off Cuba's northern coast has caught the eye of the world's energy-hungry nations. The US could see rigs drilling for Cuban oil only 50 miles off Florida. India's state-run oil firm ONGC, already signed up to exploration in the area, has just upped its stake - the latest to place its bets on a Cuban oil rush. The 44-year-old US trade embargo, meanwhile, continues to bar American companies from doing business with the Caribbean island. » Source: BBC News But, some observers are asking, can the US really afford to risk losing out on valuable energy resources only 50 miles (80km) off Key West? The prospect of nations such as China, Venezuela or India lining up to exploit Cuban oil has already led some politicians to call for the embargo to be relaxed. They want US ...

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 ...

Peak Oil is the theory, on the verge of becoming conventional wisdom, that the world's petroleum supply is topping out and will not be able to meet global demand soaring along with the economies of China and India. But a successful test in a mammoth field deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico, announced on Sept. 5 by Chevron (CVX), Devon Energy (DVN), and Norway's Statoil (STO), should help put that scary scenario on hold for decades. One huge oil reserve, even if it could rival the 1968 discovery of Prudhoe Bay and increase U.S. reserves by up to 50%, will not turn around the world's tight energy markets, of course. It won't even bring the U.S. close to energy independence when oil and gas get into full-fledged production four or five years from now. » Source: BusinessWeek But the capability to find and ...

In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush declared that the U.S. is a nation “addicted to oil” and vowed to take steps to reduce Middle Eastern imports by 75 percent by 2025. After a summer of $3-plus gasoline, most of us would see this as a good idea. But it may be too late. According to a growing cadre of petroleum geologists, the days of cheap oil are over. At issue is a concept called Hubbert's Peak, named for former oil-company geologist M. King Hubbert. In 1956, Hubbert made a bold prediction. Oil production in the Lower 48 states, he said, would peak in the early 1970s and decline forever after. He proved, if anything, slightly too optimistic: the actual peak occurred in 1970. » Source: SignOnSanDiego.com More recently, Kenneth Deffeyes, a retired geophysics ...

You can tune out all the scare talk about Peak Oil for a while—probably a long while. Peak Oil is the theory, on the verge of becoming conventional wisdom, that the world's petroleum supply is topping out and will not be able to meet global demand soaring along with the economies of China and India. But a successful test in a mammoth field deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico, announced on Sept. 5 by Chevron (CVX), Devon Energy (DVN), and Norway's Statoil (STO), should help put that scary scenario on hold for decades. One huge oil reserve, even if it could rival the 1968 discovery of Prudhoe Bay and increase U.S. reserves by up to 50%, will not turn around the world's tight energy markets, of course. It won't even bring the U.S. close to energy independence when oil and gas get into full-fledged production four or five years from now. But ...

Norway's oil output is peaking at around 3 million barrels per day and will stay at this level for the next four to five years before the country switches focus to natural gas production, a senior government official said today. "We are sort of on the peak of oil production (and) we will stay here for four or five years and then switch to gas," Reuters quoted Anders Bjarne Moe, director general of the Oil & Energy Ministry, as saying at an oil and offshore conference. The looming shift to more gas as recoverable oil supplies on the Norwegian continental shelf dwindle will curb the flow of cash into the country's oil fund, which manages assets worth nearly $250 billion or roughly Norway's annual gross domestic product. » Source: Upstreamonline Moe said Norway enjoyed the status of a safe energy supplier, noting the UK's strong ...