Oil and water

[morticia]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/...uches-100.html

Now costs approx £100 to fill a family car in the UK (not too different here)

"the general public does not have the money to pay for this"

[morticia]

Warning to anyone considering going to (or through) the UK over Easter

Fuel strikes MkII planned for the Easter weekend; remember 2000?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/ene...el-crisis.html

Francis Maude lambasted for suggesting people should stash jerry cans of petrol on their premises.

Who needs terrorists when you have the Government??? Ka-bladda-boom.

[Count Bobulescu]

There’s hope yet. The Fed Ex boss who is pioneering this energy efficiency drive is otherwise a right winger. They have 90,000 trucks and 700 planes. Between 2005 and 2010 they’ve achieved a 66% increase in MPG.

http://www.npr.org/2012/04/02/149703...cc=nh-20120402

For delivery vans, says Smith, FedEx is betting on electric or hybrid vehicles.
"An all-electric pickup and delivery van will operate at a 75 percent less per-mile cost than an internal combustion engine variant," he says. "Now, I didn't say 7 1/2 percent — [I said] 75 percent. These are big numbers."
Smith points out that the vehicles would be charged in off-peak hours, minimizing the need for additional power plants. Battery life and cost remain a challenge, but Smith is optimistic

For FedEx's fleet of nearly 700 planes, Smith says biofuel, probably produced with algae, will replace much petroleum-based jet fuel. The technology has already been proven, but breakthroughs are needed to produce the fuel on the scale that's necessary.

For larger trucks, Smith says, the alternative energy answer is liquid or compressed natural gas. He says companies like Navistar and Cummins are developing new engines to power those trucks on natural gas, at savings of about 40 percent compared with diesel at current prices.
"As Cummins and Navistar and these folks put these engines out there, anybody that makes their living driving long-haul trucks or locally fueled trucks or buses is going to have a powerful incentive," he says.
While natural gas refueling stations are a hurdle, Smith thinks an adequate number, as few as 700, could be quickly installed along the interstate highway system to make long-haul trucking with natural gas viable within a few years.

[random new yorker]

There’s hope yet. The Fed Ex boss who is pioneering this energy efficiency drive is otherwise a right winger. They have 90,000 trucks and 700 planes. Between 2005 and 2010 they’ve achieved a 66% increase in MPG.

http://www.npr.org/2012/04/02/149703...cc=nh-20120402

WOW ....how the hell do you find this stuff....don't bad mouth Fred...he is otherwise a good man!

anyway many thanks, there is some info here that i will use tomorrow ..

[Count Bobulescu]

WOW ....how the hell do you find this stuff....don't bad mouth Fred...he is otherwise a good man!

anyway many thanks, there is some info here that i will use tomorrow ..

You can sign up for email alerts from a lot of the Wash DC based media. NYT doesn't do them because of their paywall.

I get about 30-40 of these emails a day, and could sign up for more. I don't open them all.
You can sign up for multiple emails a day from WaPo, The Atlantic, National Journal, Politico, The Hill, Roll Call, NPR, and PBS. Some of them, WaPo, The Hill, Politico, will even direct you to good stuff on the other guys site. I rarely visit the sites directly, i just wait for the emails to roll in.

[Count Bobulescu]

Iraq set to overtake Iran as OPEC’s 2nd largest producer by year’s end. First time since 1988. The "Sadamm effect" has been banished. I believe it's a US plot.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...energy-markets

I

raq, seeking to more than double oil output by 2015, is poised to overtake Iran as OPEC’s second- largest producer by the end of the year as sanctions hobble crude production in its Persian Gulf neighbor.

Iraq is pumping at the highest rate since Saddam Hussein seized power in 1979, supported by foreign investors such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and BP Plc (BP/) that are developing new fields and reworking older deposits. The country produced 3.03 million barrels a day in April, 7.7 percent more than in March, while Iranian production declined to 3.2 million barrels a day, according to an OPEC monthly report on May 10. Iraq’s output last exceeded Iran’s in 1988, when the countries ended their eight-year war, statistics compiled by BP show.

With oil supplies rising from Libya and Saudi Arabia, the recovery of Iraq’s biggest foreign-currency earner is helping to alleviate concern that a European Union embargo on Iranian crude starting July 1 will squeeze global output. Tensions over Iran’s nuclear program and the prospect of curbs on its oil sales pushed Brent crude to a 3 1/2-year high of $128.40 a barrel on March 1. Oil fell to as low as $111.40 on May 11.

[Binn Beal]

It's what all those Americans died for.

[fluffybiscuits]

Iraq set to overtake Iran as OPEC’s 2nd largest producer by year’s end. First time since 1988. The "Sadamm effect" has been banished. I believe it's a US plot.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...energy-markets

I

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/fea...134071641.html

Oil is big business in Iraq. The countries oil fields have been carved up between a whole gang big corporations. Read the above from Al Jazeera for a list of who owns what and where....

[Hapax]

Forget peak oil, says George Monbiot, we've too much of the stuff:

Peak oil hasn’t happened, and it’s unlikely to happen for a very long time. A report by the oil executive Leonardo Maugeri, published by Harvard University, provides compelling evidence that a new oil boom has begun. The constraints on oil supply over the past ten years appear to have had more to do with money than geology. The low prices before 2003 had discouraged investors from developing difficult fields. The high prices of the past few years have changed that.

So this is where we are. The automatic correction – resource depletion destroying the machine that was driving it – that many environmentalists foresaw is not going to happen. The problem we face is not that there is too little oil, but that there is too much.

We have confused threats to the living planet with threats to industrial civilisation. They are not, in the first instance, the same thing. Industry and consumer capitalism, powered by abundant oil supplies, are more resilient than many of the natural systems they threaten. The great profusion of life in the past – fossilised in the form of flammable carbon – now jeopardises the great profusion of life in the present.

There is enough oil in the ground to deepfry the lot of us, and no obvious means by which we might prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground.

http://www.monbiot.com/2012/07/02/false-summit/

[fluffybiscuits]

Forget peak oil, says George Monbiot, we've too much of the stuff:






http://www.monbiot.com/2012/07/02/false-summit/

Surely this is a case of supply and demand. If they tap the oil wells that were difficult to access before and flood the markets with cheap oil then this means that there is going to be excess oil and the price drops would it not? Then again with the situation fragile in Iran and places like Niger Delta being prone to attack there could be an issue with the worlds oil supply very soon keeping the price artificially high which of course only benefits big corporations. All it takes is for the Straits of Hormuz to be shut and bye bye cheap oil....

[Hapax]

Surely this is a case of supply and demand. If they tap the oil wells that were difficult to access before and flood the markets with cheap oil then this means that there is going to be excess oil and the price drops would it not? Then again with the situation fragile in Iran and places like Niger Delta being prone to attack there could be an issue with the worlds oil supply very soon keeping the price artificially high which of course only benefits big corporations. All it takes is for the Straits of Hormuz to be shut and bye bye cheap oil....

Not necessarily, if Monbiot's to be believed:

the other great boom is likely to happen in the US. . . .

Investment there will concentrate on unconventional oil, especially shale oil (which, confusingly, is not the same as oil shale). Shale oil is high-quality crude trapped in rocks through which it doesn’t flow naturally. There are, we now know, monstrous deposits in the United States: one estimate suggests that the Bakken shales in North Dakota contain almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia (though less of it is extractable). And this is one of 20 such formations in the US. Extracting shale oil requires horizontal drilling and fracking: a combination of high prices and technological refinements has made them economically viable. Already production in North Dakota has risen from 100,000 barrels a day in 2005 to 550,000 this January.

[fluffybiscuits]

Not necessarily, if Monbiot's to be believed:

So even if there was a war and a shortage of oil, they have enough internally to keep themselves afloat. There will be a big back lash against this if it involves fracking though, will be interesting to see what political manouveres are used to gain a foothold in North Dakota...

[Count Bobulescu]

The “BIG” oil companies are not the western majors, rather they are dwarfed by state owned companies of the producing nations.

The world oil industry is now dominated by national oil companies, particularly in the Middle East, while the old "Seven Sisters," which used to dominate the world market, have been reduced to what Andrew McKillop calls the "Five Anxious Dwarfs."

http://www.realclearenergy.org/chart...il_106619.html

Better graphic here.

http://www.petrostrategies.org/Links..._companies.htm

[morticia]

Monbiot is forgetting one teeny weeny little issue, which is that all of the unconventional sources cost way more than the light sweet crude of yore. So while there may be more expensive oil than we thought, the whole $10 per barrel thing that fuelled the boom of the late 1990s won't be back. It is possible that the debt-a-geddon we are currently living through is unresolvable at current pricing. I believe the term is demand destruction, to be seen in action at a Eurozone near you...this will feed through to the Chinese property bubble eventually, too. When the oil price collapses, the producing nations face huge financial problems as they have become very dependent on higher prices. So investment in riskier sources drops. So supply drops, and the price rises, and the whole deflationary cycle begins again.

Fun, fun, fun, until Daddy takes the T bird away, tralala

[Count Bobulescu]

China is becoming what the US used to be with respect to Middle East oil dependence.

China, on the other hand, is heading in the opposite direction. Its oil import dependence now stands at about 55 percent, or importing about 5.3 million barrels per day (BPD) out of total demand of 9.9 million BPD, according to PetroChina estimates. This is roughly equivalent to the peak of U.S. import dependence, and much of China's oil comes from the same places that had been such a big part of the American supply. As of 2010, nearly half of China's imported oil arrived from the Gulf, including Libya and Iraq. In short, China risks becoming the "new U.S." in the Middle East, a direct result of its energy-intensive growth model and the rapid expansion of the transport sector.

http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...em-too/259947/