The Oil Drum

Peak Oil Media: Our Energy Asshat President on Energy

See, it's much funnier, isn't it? Drupal won't let me do it in the title though, and it didn't seem to come through in the RSS feed, so the effect is moot. Anyway, here's your president talking about contemporary energy matters (original video link).

and we can't embed CNN's video player, so you'll have to go over there and watch Kunstler's well-done piece on Glenn Beck if you haven't seen it already:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2008/05/14/beck.life.oil.cnn?iref=videosearch

And, yes, under the fold, if you can believe it, yes, that's your president doing his best Dr. Evil (from Austin Powers) impression. No, I am not kidding.

This is the final piece of a series on Energy Return on Investment from Professor Charles Hall's EROI Workshop at SUNY. Today's papers outline the energy technologies of wave and geothermal power, concluding a 5 part series that has looked at Why EROI Matters, Natural Gas and Imported Oil, Tar Sands and Shale Oil, Nuclear Power, and Passive Solar, Photovoltaic, Wind, and Hydro-electric. Previously, Professor Hall also wrote the thought provoking, At $100 Oil, What Can the Scientist Say to the Investor. Forget not about the simple 'balloon graph' below of EROI x Scale for fossil and renewable energy sources that this project is attempting to update with the help of theoildrum.com readership.

Huge study documents changes from climate warming

A landmark new climate study released today reports that global warming is already changing the life cycles of thousands of animals and plants — as well as hundreds of physical systems — worldwide.

It documents rapid glacier melts in North America, South America and Europe; trees and plants sprouting leaves much earlier in the spring in Europe, Asia and North America; permafrost melting in Asia; and changes in bird migration patterns across Europe, North America and Australia, all in response to rising global temperatures.

While previous studies have looked at single phenomena or smaller areas, this is a new analysis on a continental scale looking at data that had not been previously assembled together in one spot, says lead author Cynthia Rosenzweig, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

For those who didn't see it last night, Tony Jones interviewed Richard Heinberg about peak oil on the ABC's "Lateline" program.

Video - RealPlayer and Windows Media.

TONY JONES: Now to tonight's interview with Richard Heinberg. He's one of the world's leading experts on the phenomenon of peak oil. That's the point at which the world's oil reserves go into decline. The idea is that having reached its peak it's all downhill from there and there's evidence that global rates of oil discovery have been declining since the 1960s, and that new oilfields are becoming more and more inaccessible.

So as demand increases and supply decreases the price of oil goes up and up and up, as we've painfully experienced in recent years. No one really knows when we'll reach peak oil. It may have already happened, it may take another three decades. Why has the price of oil gone up so fast and so high in recent years? How much higher could it go and can anything be done to reverse this relentless process?

Richard Heinberg has written a series of books on the oil crisis including 'The Party's over', 'Power Down' and his latest 'The Oil Depletion Protocol'. I spoke to him a short time ago in Santa Rosa, California.

Richard Heinberg, thanks for joining us.

This is the talk I was honored to deliver to ASPO Italy on 3rd May 2008 at their annual conference in Turin. 24 slides below the fold plus narrative of what I said on the day. The narrative boxes are below the slides.

An Italian translation of this post is available here. Thanks to Maurizio Moretto for the translation. Thanks are also due to Jean Laherrere of ASPO France for providing his interpretations of Russian and North African gas supplies.

US senators pressuring Saudis to hike oil output

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senate Democrats Tuesday introduced legislation to stop a U.S. arms sale to Saudi Arabia worth $1.4 billion in a tactic supporters said was aimed at pressuring the OPEC country to increase its oil output.

"We are saying that we need real relief and we need it quickly. You (Saudi Arabia) need our arms, but we need you to cooperate and not strangle American consumers," said Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat.

Today's SMH has a prominent article on the impact of rising petrol prices on Sydney suburbs featuring a study by Peter Rickwood of UTS (one of Garry Glazebrook's students (pdf) by the look of it). ASPO Australia's David Bell gets a mention too.

There is a good graphic accompanying the article (Update: 3 images now included) which shows the sensitivity to petrol prices (in terms of proportion of gross income) across the metropolitan area under 2 scenarios - $1.50 a litre petrol and $2.00 a litre petrol. Under the second scenario most of western Sydney will be devoting more than 6% of their income to fuel consumption.

The results look somewhat similar to the charts in the Griffith University report on Oil Vulnerability in Australian Cities from a couple of years ago.

Image 1 - % of household income at $1.50 per litre

A related personal impact story looks at the impact of fuel prices and lack of public transport on one western Sydney family - though their refusal to share vehicles and large petrol guzzling cars do reduce the amount of sympathy generated somewhat...

It isn't hard to see why I am an oil shale skeptic. I outlined my reasons in two essays on oil shale: “Oil Shale Development Imminent” and Oil Shale = Cellulosic Ethanol.

In those essays, I provided some history of oil shale, discussed Shell's unique process, as well as the reasons those "trillions of barrels" remain elusive. But one of Shell's recent moves has raised some eyebrows, as they are in the process of buying up water rights in Colorado to process the shale.

Old gas pumps can't handle ever-rising prices

REARDAN, Wash. - Mom-and-pop service stations are running into a problem as gasoline marches toward $4 a gallon: Thousands of old-fashioned pumps can't register more than $3.99 on their spinning mechanical dials.

The pumps, throwbacks to a bygone era on the American road, are difficult and expensive to upgrade, and replacing them is often out of the question for station owners who are still just scraping by.

Many of the same pumps can only count up to $99.99 for the total sale, preventing owners of some SUVs, vans, trucks and tractor-trailers to fill their tanks all the way.