Peak Oil News

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: ...

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 ...

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, ...

A global energy plan to be released by the World Bank next month risks squandering scarce resources on so-called clean coal technologies and misses bigger investments in renewable energy, but does address gaps in the energy needs of the poor, according to a new analysis by an environmental group. World Bank officials will discuss the document, called the "Progress Report on the Investment Framework for Clean Energy and Development", later this month before it is placed on the agenda of the joint annual meetings of the World Bank and its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), next month in Singapore. A similar programme focusing on longer term country-level activities and global research will be completed by the Group of Eight most industrialised countries at their summit in Japan in 2008. Rich nations had asked the ...