Explaining The Inexplicable

In particular, Obama's decision to open new area's to offshore drilling:
Obama’s decision probably doesn’t make sense unless you take the fear factor into account. Let’s face it, if you were President of the United States, and you looked at this graph, what would you do? I don’t know about you, but I would probably start by saying something like, “HOLY SHIT!” Politically, Obama is looking at rapidly rising petroleum prices right around the time of his reelection campaign, if not sooner. Economically, he’s looking at a potential crunch just when things are supposed to be getting better. And while opening these new regions to drilling isn’t going to solve the problem (because even if large amounts of oil are lurking there the supply won’t come on line for about a decade), at least he’s now given himself political cover.

And Yoshiaki Arata Shall Save Us All...

When the Fleischmann/Pons experiments did not pan out in the late 1980s, the subject of cold fusion more or less disappeared from respectable scientific discourse. Nevertheless, research has continued in a kind of underground fashion, and occasionally interesting if inconclusive results have been reported.

Now, Japanese researcher Yoshiaki Arata has apparently

...demonstrated a low-energy nuclear reaction at Osaka University on Thursday. In front of a live audience, including reporters from six major newspapers and two tv studios, Arata and a co-professor Yue-Chang Zhang, produced excess heat and helium atoms from deuterium gas.

So is an era of cheap, abundant, and clean energy just around the corner? Well, a few caveats have been expressed here:

Augustin McEvoy, a retired condensed-matter physicist...has studied Arata's previous cold-fusion experiments in detail. He said that he has found "no conclusive evidence of excess heat" before, though he would like to know how this demonstration turned out.

And here is a .pdf outlining the Arata's experimental setup. Looks pretty easy, in fact. I may crank up one of these on the weekend and stick in the Cavaliere.

Shell Oil CEO: Its OWG Or Anarchy!!!

Well, not quite, but Shell's head poobah Jeroen van der Veer is concerned about the planet's energy future, what with AGW and peak oil only 7 years away, and he has outlined his concerns in this letter to Shell employees which, believe me, you will be hearing about in the coming days and weeks.

I had a whole long post written up about this, and blogger went and ate the damn thing. So just go read Jeroen.

Peak Oil, Green Energy

Simmons and Company International call themselves "Investment Bankers to the EnergyIndustry". Just in time for dooms-dayish stories like "World will face oil crunch ‘in five years’", they have launched a nifty slide show entitled "Autopsy of an Energy Crisis" in which they predict that an era of gas rationing will force North Americans into a Green future powered by such alternative energy sources as offshore wind and aquatic bio-fuels (that means diesel from Algae, I think).

Interesting, then, that for different quite reasons, the environmental movement and the energy industry are converging on a single goal: a post-petroleum society.

h/t to Denis for pointing me to the slide-show.

Is Peak Oil Upon Us?

From the U.K. Independent:

Scientists have criticised a major review of the world's remaining oil reserves, warning that the end of oil is coming sooner than governments and oil companies are prepared to admit.

BP's Statistical Review of World Energy, published yesterday, appears to show that the world still has enough "proven" reserves to provide 40 years of consumption at current rates. The assessment, based on officially reported figures, has once again pushed back the estimate of when the world will run dry.

However, scientists led by the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre, say that global production of oil is set to peak in the next four years before entering a steepening decline which will have massive consequences for the world economy and the way that we live our lives.

What makes this analysis more than usually compelling is that, while oil companies may not be prepared to admit the imminent arrival of peak oil to the public, they seem quite willing to admit it to one another. From a recent KPMG survey of oil/gas company execs:

"These executives are deeply concerned about declining oil reserves, a situation they see as irreversible and worsening," said Bill Kimble,National Line of Business Leader, Industrial Markets for KPMG LLP.

Time to whip out your old land sailor.

Oil Company Execs Think Peak Oil Is Real, Anthropogenic Global Warming Is Not

Some good news and some worse news in a recent KPMG survey of oil/gas company execs. The bad news is that:

Sixty-five percent of the respondents say that while they believe global warming is occurring, it is a natural weather cycle, and 11 percent say that they do not believe it is occurring. Just under a quarter believe CO-2- induced global warming is occurring.

The worse news is that 60 percent believe the current trend of declining oil reserves is irreversible:

"These executives are deeply concerned about declining oil reserves, a situation they see as irreversible and worsening," said Bill Kimble,National Line of Business Leader, Industrial Markets for KPMG LLP.

In other words, we're over the Hubble Peak of Peal Oil fame, and its downhill from here. Ah but that's good news, you might think, because we will be forced to transition into a alternative fuel/ low GHG emissions future. Well, not necessarily:


Although oil is the biggest single source of energy-related greenhouse gases, coal and gas combined are bigger still, and the expected growth in their emissions [after the hubble peak] would overwhelm any reduction from oil.

[...]

Soaring crude prices could tip the world into a depression deeper than that of the 1930s, and collapsing stock markets cripple our ability to finance the expensive clean energy infrastructure we need.

As the unemployment lines grow, the political will to tackle climate change may be sapped by the need to keep the lights burning as cheaply as possible.

If there is encouragement to be taken from the survey, it is that our oil execs support research into alternative energy sources as a means of combating the effects of a decline in oil reserves rather than climate change. Get your good news where you can, I suppose.
















Hubble Peak: We're Over
The Hump