Mr. Gabrielli, the CEO of Petrobras, gave a presentation in December 2009 in which he shows world oil capacity, including biofuels, peaking in 2010 due to oil capacity additions from new projects being unable to offset world oil decline rates.

Gabrielli states in his presentation that the world needs oil volumes the equivalent of one Saudi Arabia every two years to offset future world oil decline rates.

This is a stronger statement than the one he gave in January 2009 in an interview with Business Week when he said the following.

According to the company's projections, production from existing fields will fall from a little over 80 million barrels a day to maybe half of that even if new techniques are used to slow their rate of decline. So just keeping global production flat is going to require lots of new fields and requires the world to replace one Saudi Arabia per three years.

Gabrielli is clearly concerned about declining future world oil production. His statements are now in alignment with those of other oil company executives including Sadad al-Husseini, former Aramco executive, who states that world oil production is on a peak plateau, and Total's CEO, Christophe de Margerie who doesn't see global oil production ever exceeding 89 million barrels per day (mbd). World oil production in December 2009 was only slightly lower at 86 mbd.

This link from the SMH is a little old (from back in December) but its worth noting what the Australian Energy Market Operator (combining Nemmco's old electricity market operator role with that of the gas market as well) views as the outlook for the eastern states natural gas and coal seam gas supply - Rise and fall of the gas provinces.

This is a technical post relating to the production of oil from heavy sand deposits, such as those in Alberta. It is a part of an ongoing series of tech talks, and should probably be read after the post last week on surface mining of those deposits. It is simplified, and relatively short, and so there are some details that are abbreviated, but longer answers can be provided through comments.

This is one of a series of Sunday tech talks.

The movie Avatar gets the mining bit wrong. And not by just a little – but then us villains are rarely understood, so what should we expect? OK so what is a popular, nay perhaps even genre changing movie got to do with technical talks about fossil fuel production? Well, fairly early in the movie it is made clear that the sole purpose for the plot is to mine “unobtainium” which is a mineral with all sorts of value. Now I’m not going to give away much of what goes on in this movie (and I agree with most of that review by the way) but the fallacy over how they mine the deposits on the planet is one of the lessons learned from the mining of the oil sands in Alberta, which is actually what I want to discuss a little today. In the movie they use a variation on a bucket wheel excavator – which in today’s world looks like this: