The Oil Drum

SMH - Oil Search reports drop in profit

Oil Search is following an interesting strategy:

Mr Hartley said exploration expenditure in 2008 would be lower, following a disappointing run of dry holes in PNG and the Middle East.

"Capital expenditure this year will be just under $US400 million ($A438.21 million), similar to 2007/08, with more emphasis on production drilling," he said.

ABC - Govt defends 'hand-me-down' transport ticketing system

The 15-year-old ticket readers from Brisbane are being bought to replace Tcard machines, which were being trialed on buses in Sydney's south.

The machines had to be replaced because the Government cancelled the company developing the Tcard integrated transport system's contract.

.... and Cresswell takes a pot shot at CERA...

Back in November I ran article highlighting Peak Oil in the Mainstream Business Press lifted from the monthly Energy Supplement from the Press and Journal, a broad sheet that serves North Scotland - including Aberdeen, the Houston of the North. This month, two stories by Dick Winchester and Jeremy Cresswell caught my eye.

My, my, Gordon, you really are losing the plot

By Dick Winchester

GORDON Brown has come up with a new way of doing things. What you do is go and visit your biggest competitor, who has saved a few hundred billion quid to invest in or simply buy companies you might own, and who is already making oodles of cash because you’re subcontracting to said competitor most of the things you used to do, and then give them £50million to help them develop new “green” technologies.

Yes, folks, Britain’s PM’s been at it again. In exchange for a couple of carry-outs and a tour of the Beijing Olympic village, he’s offered the Chinese:....

The coal mine of Garzweiler, Germany, in a Google Earth image. The satellite has caught two giant mining machines at work. Measured with the google ruler, each "arm" of the machines measures about 120 m (ca. 400 ft). These are not universal mining machines, but give some idea of the scale of modern mining operations. The Garzweiler mine is said to hold more than a billion tons of coal reserves.

Shannon Arvizu at Triple Pundit has an article on the dilemma facing the good citizens of Fort Collins in Colorado (and home of Colorado State University--note the advert in the sidebar)- choosing solar or nuclear power.

The New York Times reported today an intriguing article on what's happening in Fort Collins, Colorado - a city that prides itself on being a bastion of green living. The town's motto, "Where renewal is a way of life," is more than just a metaphor. The city is heavily involved in promoting carbon-free energy production. They currently have two proposals on the table - an innovative solar panel production plant and a uranium mining project for nuclear power. Although the energy that wil be generated from each project will be carbon-free, the processes of production and/or extraction each have their own environmental hazards. Should the town support nuclear, solar, or both? And what about the NIMBY factor? Should the town expose itself to possible health hazards for the sake of local job creation and global carbon-free energy production?

New Movie "What Would Jesus Buy" Starring the Rev. Billy Coming to some local theaters

With Thanksgiving and Black Friday (or Buy Nothing Day) behind us, I thought it might be nice to let everyone share their experiences over the holidays.

How did you get to your destination? How far did you go and did you carpool, walk or take public transport there? Was there any talk over the table about oil/gas prices or global warming? What's the general feeling around your area about these issues? Did all your relatives and friends get caught up in the shopping madness looking for the best deals on stuff they need?

And, under the fold, as an antidote to the usual Christmas shopping madness, I bring you The Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping...

This is Part 2 of a post by GliderGuider. Paul's website can be found here.

In Part 1 I derived a scenario for the changing global energy supply picture between now and 2050. The conclusion in that article was that due to the rapid decline of oil and natural gas supplies, the total energy available to the world would drop by about 30% in that time. That single figure, however, doesn't tell us much. The picture is dramatically complicated by the fact that the world will be forced to transition from an energy economy largely based on fuels (oil and natural gas) to one based primarily on electricity generated from a variety of sources. In addition, most of the world's population growth in that time will occur in the energy-poor and economically-poor developing world.

In order to gain more insight into how changes in energy will affect different parts of the world, this article will examine the impact of energy declines in specific countries. We will disaggregate the global picture presented in the baseline energy article, and apply those changes to the specific energy circumstances of individual nations. Those energy changes will be translated into their effect on national GDP. The national population changes projected by the UN Medium Fertility Case will be used to translate the national GDP changes into average per capita GDP changes for each country.

The examination of changing per capita GDP, driven by changes in the energy supply and national populations, will help us understand the distribution and extent of wealth and poverty over the next half century.

This is Part 1 of a guest post by GliderGuider. Paul's website can be found here.

This article supercedes an earlier work, "World Energy and Population: Trends to 2100". Compared to that paper this article offers a more comprehensive look at the world's evolving energy picture and confines its projections to the first half of the century. Also unlike that earlier work, this article makes no assumptions about changes in human population due directly to reductions in the world's energy supply. At the end of the article I will briefly examine one highly probable effect the decline in total energy would have on the quality of human life.

Now that New York has had six months since Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC sustainability plan, kicked off and they have released their interim report on their progress, I thought I might take a step back to think about how we evaluate sustainability at the local level.

Here at The Oil Drum, we love good data. We love hard objective data that can not only tell a story, but highlight the importance of a particular issue in a crisp fashion. However at the local level, data is not as easy to locate or not consistent enough to make an objective positive statement. The result, as many have probably realized, is that local discussions become inherently normative, political and frankly, messy.

So, help me find some data at the local level...

Many themes pervade the day-to-day attention span of the world's citizenry right now: terrorism, fear of religious systems not your own, Asian growth, crime, immigration, poverty, war, global warming/climate change--so many are called "important."

All of these sets of attitude objects vary in importance, salience, and validity depending on who you talk to; but all are definitely a part of the din of noise we subject ourselves to every day.

It still remains my concern, however, that the pillars to the myriad houses of problems I list above are those of world energy depletion--namely oil and its peak.

This leads me to my main question, which I will address in this post: how and when are human beings able to cut through all of that noise? How can they be persuaded? Is there a difference between "elites" (defined as the people who read The Oil Drum, of course) and the "masses"?

Surely persuasion and attitude change takes place; people change their minds every day on issues. What insights can we claim from psychology to get those we care about, and even those we don't, to dig deeper to get to an understanding of the pillars of the problems we face, instead of trying to buy aluminum siding for a house slowly falling in on itself?

Ed by PG: This post originally ran June '06. It seemed germane; some of the discussion of late has been about persuasion and individual attitudes...

This is a guest post by Glenn Morton, a geophysicist in the oil industry. For Kerr-McGee Oil and Gas Corp., Glenn served as Geophysical Mgr Gulf of Mexico, Geophysical Mgr for the North Sea, Dir. of Technology and as Exploration Director of China. Currently he is an independent consulting geophysicist, and you might know him as seismobob.

I became fascinated with the connection between our food supply and energy when I first learned of the problems that North Korea was having feeding itself. (see here).  This data showed me something amazing about modern society, we don't live in the information age, we don't live in the industrial age, we live in the agricultural  age. Without food, we have no industry or information. Unfortunately many don't understand this.  Nor do they understand that today the modern farming system is merely a means to turn petroleum into food, via mechanized planting and harvesting, and the use of petroleum based insecticides and fertilizers which consume huge amounts of energy in their manufacture.  According to Wikipedia, who gets it from Science, 1% of the world's energy goes into the manufacture of chemical fertilizer (here).

There has recently been a claim that in the post-peak oil world, life will go on pretty much as normal.  For a while, as the world squeezes inefficiencies out of the economic system and fuel switching occurs, this is true.  But one can not seriously believe that the world economy is infinitely elastic with regards to energy.  With regard to the agricultural system, there is data which shows the limits to this inelasticity and these limits are due to the laws of physics.