Peak Oil News

The peak oil movement — an unlikely alliance of geologists, physicists, oil industry consultants and environmental activists — seems to be gaining momentum and winning new converts. For the first time, some say, peaksters have begun to grab the attention of Washington and Wall Street. The US Energy Secretary has now asked his advisory body, the National Petroleum Council, to investigate if oil supplies could keep pace with (the rising global) demand. Further, the US government accountability office, a non-partisan congressional watchdog, is due to release a study on peak oil this November. Interestingly, a congressional peak oil caucus has also been formed in the meantime, too. » Source: MENAFM Naturally with the theory of peak oil coming increasingly under discussion, the focus is bound to shift on Ghawar, the world's super giant well — accounting for more than six percent of the global oil needs ...

The need for such a protocol is becoming increasingly plain. Petroleum is a non-renewable, polluting, and depleting resource on which the world has become dangerously dependent. This in itself should be cause for nations to find ways to reduce their consumption and thus their dependency. However, there is also the problem of uncertain future supply. Long before the last drop of petroleum has been recovered from any given reservoir the possible rate of extraction tends to peak and then fall off for purely physical, geological reasons. Today, most oil-producing countries have already reached and passed their national production peaks and are in steady decline. There is universal agreement that the world as a whole will reach its peak rate of production at some point in the next few decades-but there is controversy as to when, exactly, the peak will come. While some analysts forecast the maximum flow rate as occurring later ...

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 ...

China, the world's second-largest oil consumer, hopes dialogue and conciliatory policies will blunt tensions caused by its growing energy needs, a Foreign Ministry official said on Wednesday. Liu Jianchao, the Chinese Foreign Ministry's chief spokesman, said China's growing appetite for natural resources would not put it in conflict with other countries, and that it was actively pursuing alternatives to imported oil. "At the moment we are trying to rely on ourselves for energy supply and at the same time trying to find clean, alternative energy resources," Liu said at the Reuters China Century Summit. » Source: Reuters China gets more than 40 percent of its oil from abroad and most of that oil arrives by sea. But Liu said that while China was concerned about the guaranteed supply of crude, its needs would not put it in conflict with other countries. "We are ready to work with the United States, with the European ...

Japan needs friends who are rich in natural resources, and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made no bones about what he wanted from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan when he became the first Japanese premier to visit the two countries last month. The country is hardly alone, however, in looking to parts of the former Soviet Union to meet its energy needs from new sources, and indeed, rivalry among East Asian nations may well intensify as they compete to woo the region. Only days after Koizumi left the region last week, China National Petroleum Corp., China`s largest oil producer, said that together with Korea National Oil Corp., Malaysia`s Petronas, Lukoil of Russia, and local group Uzbekneftegaz, it had obtained a 20-percent stake in a joint oil and gas exploration project in Uzbekistan`s Aral Sea extending about 10,000 square kilometers that potentially has 8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. » Source: M&C News Each ...

Underneath the high, scrub-covered rangeland of northwest Colorado is the world's biggest oil field. Getting the oil out of the ground, however, is one of the world's biggest headaches. The area's deposits of oil shale are believed to be larger than all the oil reserves of the Middle East. But past attempts to get at this oil locked in tarry rock have cost billions of dollars and raised the prospect of strip-mining large areas of the Rocky Mountain West. Now, as the federal government makes another push to develop oil shale, Shell and other companies say they have developed techniques that may extract this treasure with much less environmental impact. » Source: San Francisco Chronicle Shell's project is stunningly complex. Instead of strip-mining the rock and then processing it, Shell plans to ...

Fuel cell cars could one day run on hydrogen made from cooking oil now research into a novel way of producing hydrogen is to take a step forward. If the process is proved to have commercial potential, other sources of the gas could include scrap tyres and waste industrial oil. A team at the Energy and Resources Research Institute of Leeds University is perfecting the making of liquid fuels by reforming unmixed steam. Put simply, fuel is reacted with steam to release hydrogen from both. The process was invented 10 years ago in the US but not made public until 1999. Now researchers around the world are trying to make it commercially viable so that it can play a significant role in the much-touted 'hydrogen economy'. » Source: Fuel Cell Works It claims to be a convenient way to distribute fuel for hydrogen production, ...