One of the largest accidental releases of oil in Alberta’s history isn’t a burst pipeline and it doesn’t involve a train of tanker cars derailing into a river. It’s also not a thing of the past. It’s been going on for about a year and it’s still happening. An estimated 12,000 barrels of bitumen and [...]
As I head down to Washington to speak at the ASPO-USA (Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas) 2010 World Oil Conference this week, I can’t help but reflect on how far the peak oil movement has come over the last decade. It’s not too hard to figure out why. There is a [...]
America’s Plan A for the future of its oil supply was shaky to start with. Hurricanes, and the devastation they’ve brought to offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, had already put the kibosh on earlier dreams of reversing the nearly 40-year decline in domestic oil production. Ironically, oil production in the Gulf had [...]
Will the unfolding environmental catastrophe from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico become deep-water oil’s equivalent to the Three Mile Island nuclear accident? In terms of environmental degradation and economic cost, it’s already become much more. The real legacy of Three Mile Island wasn’t what happened back in 1979, though, but [...]
America’s dream of greater energy independence is rapidly turning into an ecological nightmare. Instead of filling empty gas tanks, BP’s Deepwater Horizon well miles offshore is oozing thousands of barrels a day of oil, already covering an area over 1,900 square miles in the food-rich waters of the Gulf of Mexico. With no way of [...]
It’s Wednesday, and the week’s US oil inventories numbers will soon be out. I have no clue what they will say, nor much interest, either. But others do. Exactly why oil traders and speculators think the data has anything to do with the state of world oil demand is beyond me. I suppose, like Pavlov’s [...]