Russia pulls 10 millionth barrel of oil from Arctic

Russian oil company Gazprom Neft said it reached a milestone with production at its Arctic Prirazlomnoye field with its 10 millionth barrel of oil. "The 10-millionth barrel of oil is a major landmark, proving that oil production on the Arctic Shelf can be both safe and viable," Gennady Lubin, the company's executive director for operations on the Russian continental shelf, said in a statement. Advocacy groups like Greenpeace have been critical about oil operations in the extreme climates of the Arctic north, saying an oil spill in the region would be catastrophic and difficult to control. Gazprom Neft said a stationary rig at the site is designed specifically to ensure the risks of a spill are minimized to the greatest extent possible. Production, the company said, is planned around what it described as stringent environmental safeguards. Last week, the company revised its production schedule ...

Peak oil delayed but not over

Some analysts say peak oil is over and the current global supply of oil proves it. A closer look suggests peak oil remains an issue but it is occurring differently than had been projected. The peak oil concept was based on the scientific understanding that the amount of conventional, low cost oil in the ground is finite and at some point will be depleted. The late Shell geologist, M. King Hubbert, illustrated that the rate of petroleum production from an oil field increases until reaching a peak and then declining gradually. Production follows a bell shaped curve. In 1956 Hubbert successfully predicted that oil production from conventional wells in the United States would peak in 1970. Later he predicted that global supplies of low cost conventional oil would peak around 2000. It is suggested that conventional global supplies of oil peaked in ...

Oil Price Spike Could Be Coming Soon

Oil and gas companies have canceled more than $100 billion in investments and have slashed tens of thousands of jobs in the past year amid the collapse in oil prices. Now an oil shock may be on the way as those cutbacks drive a significant drop in crude supplies, a senior executive from the International Energy Agency said Wednesday. “Historic” investment cuts in recent months raise the risk of oil-security surprises in the “not-too-distant” future, Neil Atkinson, head of the IEA’s oil industry and markets division, told reporters in Singapore. He said oil and gas markets need about $300 billion to sustain current levels of production — and nations such as the U.S., Canada, Brazil and Mexico are struggling to keep up. “There’s a danger as we are reaching a point where we are barely investing upstream,” Atkinson said at the launch of Singapore ...

Europe is now drowning under the cost of welfare bills

The UK's total spending on social protection is only slightly below the European average at 16.5pc of GDP Credit: Ian Jones When she isn’t shipping in more Syrian refugees, or trying to find new ways to destroy the Greek economy, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel is fond of quoting an alarming statistic: Europe accounts for just 7pc of the world’s population, and 25pc of its GDP, and yet it also accounts for a massive 50pc of its welfare spending. The point is an important one. Europe’s welfare spending is out of control, and is on a scale that is both lavish and unaffordable compared with the rest of the world. There is a problem, however. Neither she, nor any other political leader in Europe, has the will to do anything about it. Eurostat, the statistical agency of ...

Rockefeller Fund Divests Fossil Fuels, Says Exxon Is “Morally Reprehensible”

The winner of today's "peak irony", or rather hypocrisy, award is easy: it goes to the Rockefeller Family Fund, a charity which exists only thanks to John D. Rockefeller's creation of the Standard Oil carbon-spewing behemoth (a predecessor to today's ExxonMobil) which over the past century has created billions in profits for the Rockefeller family and billions in tons of CO2 emissions, "proudly announcing" this morning that it intends to sell all fossil fuel exposure, and that it would "eliminate holdings" of ExxonMobil because the oil company associated with the family fortune has "worked since the 1980s to confuse the public about climate change." The U.S.-based charity will also divest its coal and Canadian oil sands holdings. This striking move is the result of the Fund's "green" metamorphosis. According to the charity, given the threat posed to the survival of human and ...

Report warns of severe global water shortage

A new report has warned that almost half of the world would be plunged into severe water stress by 2030, if countries and their governments do not alter current levels of demand for the precious commodity and ongoing pollution of rivers, seas and oceans. The International Resource Panel (IRP) says in the report it released yesterday during the World Water Day (WWD) further warns that, almost half of the world’s population will suffer severe water stress in the next 15 years if interventions to reduce consumption and pollution are not stopped. Under the current trends, IRP says, demand for water will exceed supply by 40 per cent in 2030, forcing governments to spend $200 billion (Sh20 trillion) per year on upstream water supply as demand outstrips cheaper forms of supply—up from historic averages of $40 (Sh4 trillion) to $45 billion (Sh5 trillion). Current ...

The Oracle Of Oil

Podcast: Play in new window | Download Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS Many have heard of peak oil, but few seem to understand what it really means, and fewer still know much of anything about the father of the idea, M. King Hubbert. In this episode we interview science journalist Mason Inman, who has written the first biography of Hubbert: The Oracle of Oil: A Maverick Geologist’s Quest for a Sustainable Future, which hits the shelves April 11. Deeply researched and rich with detail about the debates over our energy future (and energy transition) from the 1940s through the 1980s, the book is a terrific read for anyone interested in peak oil theory, what it is about, and what it is not about (for example, oil prices!). Today’s debates about the future of energy aren’t too dissimilar from the debates of ...

A World War Has Begun

I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.” Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 — the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for twelve years. Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter. Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green ...

Oil search in Arctic is safe claims Statoil

Ice, extreme temperatures and a vulnerable environment are all surmountable challenges as drillers set out to hunt for oil in a new area of Norway’s Arctic Barents Sea, according to Statoil and other explorers. Studies by Statoil and 15 other companies such as Shell show there have been only a “few days” of sea ice in the northernmost blocks since 2003, and south of that even less, said Aashild Tandberg Skjaerseth, chair of the Barents Sea Exploration Collaboration, a venture set up by the companies. It’s also unlikely that any spill would reach the polar ice cap as oil and sea ice tend to drift in the same direction, she said. “Our main conclusion is that there is no health, environmental or safety challenge that is so significant that it can’t be appropriately mitigated,” Skjaerseth said. The findings were handed over to authorities this ...

Protesters turn up heat in fossil fuel fight

They came here to get arrested. Nearly 60 protesters blocked the driveway of a storage plant for natural gas on March 7. Its owners want to expand the facility, which the opponents say would endanger nearby Seneca Lake. But their concerns were global, as well. "There's a climate emergency happening," one of the protesters, Coby Schultz, said. "It's a life-or-death struggle." The demonstration here was part of a wave of actions across the nation that combines traditional not-in-my-backyard protests against fossil-fuel projects with an overarching concern about climate change. Activists have been energized by successes on several fronts, including the decision last week by President Barack Obama to block offshore drilling along the Eastern Seaboard; his decision in November to reject the Keystone XL pipeline; and the Paris climate agreement. Bound together through social media, networks of far-flung activists are opposing virtually all new oil, ...

Sudan will never recover earlier production levels

South Sudan’s oil ministry has concluded that oil production is in quick decline, and ...

Massive US airstrike in Yemen kills dozens of people

A massive US airstrike in Yemen has killed what the Pentagon estimates is “dozens” ...

Fuss over “missing” 800,000 oil barrels: ‘Get over it,’ says IEA official

Has the hoo-ha over the 800,000 “missing barrels”, the difference between average daily global ...

The Future of Batteries and Electric Vehicles

Steve Levine, author of "The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save ...