Peak Oil (was "petroleum geologist explains US war policy")

[Japey]

M-Y-T-H

I think that in focussing on the spelling bee, you forgot about the logic.

 

[Bob_the_lost]

I think that in focussing on the spelling bee, you forgot about the logic.

I liked that program, definity worth recording.

 

[Japey]

Anyway, methane hydrates - a way to avoid the energy crisis (at huge environmental cost?)?

 

[bigfish]

Saudi's scoff at Bush call for greater production...

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2005/s1353684.htm

GEORGE W. BUSH: The Crown Prince understands that it's very important for there to be a – to make sure that the prices are reasonable. High oil price will damage markets, and he knows that.

JOHN SHOVELAN: The Bush administration wants an increase in supply by producers like Saudi Arabia. But the Saudis rejected the White House's demands, saying production isn't the cause of the price increase. Instead Adel al Jubeir, spokesman for the Saudi Government, says the US needs to increase its own refining capacity and agree on uniform petrol standards for the country.

ADEL AL JUBEIR: It will not make a difference if Saudi Arabia ships and extra million or two million barrels of crude oil to the United States if you cannot refine it, it will not turn into gasoline and that will not turn into lower prices. The infrastructure for energy globally is beginning to max out. The ability of the world to ship, to refine, to distribute, to store crude oil, is fairly close to what the amount of oil produced is today.

To scam the people on oil all the Bush Gang (Exxon/Mobil/Chevron/Shell/BP/Haliburton/Bectel/PetroConsultants/ODAC/ASPO/etc.) need do is deploy the same architecture of embezzlement perfected by Enron and others in the power distribution industry, i.e., create artificial, inbuilt distribution bottlenecks and use these to ratchet up the price behind a cacophony of "Peak Oil" hysteria.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

<snip>create artificial, inbuilt distribution bottlenecks and use these to ratchet up the price behind a cacophony of "Peak Oil" hysteria.

This is the first sensible thing (IMO) that you've said in a while and I wouldn't be at all surprised if something like that happened. Having said that, like the Griffin thing you came up with earlier, there is no obvious chain of logical inference from that to a claim that global oil supplies are unlimited.

You could argue that oil supplies were unlimited if you could demonstrate the strong abiotic hypothesis, but you haven't come near showing that so far.

Showing that assorted arseholes either do, or might plan to, exploit the peak oil hypothesis for nefarious ends does not show that the hypothesis is wrong.

 

[bigfish]

Among friends at 'Blair Petroleum'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,590449,00.html

Anji Hunter will be among New Labour friends when she starts her new job as director of communications at BP - nicknamed Blair Petroleum for its close links with the government.

The chief executive John Browne is close to the prime minister and a grateful Mr Blair added a peerage to the oilman's knighthood after he helped end the fuel protests of summer last year.

Ms Hunter knows Lord Browne well from his frequent trips to No 10 and she is on first name terms with Nick Butler, an unofficial Blairite adviser who is the oil giant's policy chief.

A very familiar face will be Philip Gould, Mr Blair's favourite pollster, who has fought three elections with Ms Hunter and has also undertaken research and run focus groups for BP.

Lord Simon was chairman of BP until May 1997, when he resigned to become trade minister in Mr Blair's first government, sparking a row when it emerged he still owned a considerable shareholding in the company.

Lady Smith, widow of the former Labour leader John Smith, was made a paid member of BP's Scottish advisory board after her husband's death, where she sat alongside Lord Gordon, another Labour peer.
Barely a month after Peter Mandelson was forced to quit as trade and industry secretary over his secret £373,000 cheap home loan from Geoffrey Robinson, BP paid his hotel and travel expenses to a conference in Paris, according to the register of members' interests.

Two years ago the Foreign Office minister Peter Hain and Sir John Morris, then attorney general, received and declared free tickets and hospitality for the Wimbledon tennis championships from BP.

 

[Backatcha Bandit]

Griffin and the BNP 'onside' with "Peak Oil"

http://www.bnp.org.uk/columnists/brimstone2.php?leeId=27

The Politics of Peak Oil and Fascism

So, I went up to Nick Griffin, confirmed his identity and then asked why he was here amongst all these left-wingers. His measured answer was that though Peak Oil received minimal coverage in their manifesto, they see it as a long-term issue which may well make its way up to the top of their policy list...

..
I propose that the BNP see this coming paradigm shift and are preparing. They know the history of the rise of the Nazi party, they see an opportunity to rise themselves. Given the darker side of human nature, they could well be right...

-

On a brighter note - A Community Solution to Peak Oil: An interview with Megan Quinn

The main reason that people don't want to talk about Peak Oil, industrial collapse, or ecological collapse is because they categorize these all as "doom and gloom" scenarios. We are labeled as pessimists and discounted...

..The best strategy is to explain why the post-oil, post-industrial world will be more peaceful, healthy, and happy. While our current way of life may seem to be prosperous, we in fact are living in temporary material abundance at the expense of many of those in the rest of the world and future generations. Living cooperatively is a more socially and spiritually fulfilling way to live.

Whatever we all think is going on - artificial constraints to generate further stupefying profits for oilco's, resource depletion or the undeniable imperative of climate change, or all of the above plus a whole lot more - the answers appear to be the same.

www.communitysolution.org

 

[bigfish]

So, I went up to Nick Griffin, confirmed his identity and then asked why he was here amongst all these left-wingers.

[T]he "Peak Oil UK" conference organised by Depletion Scotland on the 25th April had a familiar look to it. On view were representatives from the media, environmental groups and oil-related academia as well as concerned individuals such as myself. Also, the sight of Colin Campbell and Matt Simmons as speakers and even Mike Ruppert in the audience gave it all a kind of kindred feel to it all.

Anybody notice anything wrong with the authors description of the conference being largely composed of... 'left-wingers'?

Let me see if i can help.

Mike Ruppert is a neo-Malthusian endtimes prophet who likes to turn a profit wherever he can. He thinks the human population is too big and would like to see it culled down to size. Of course, he's way at the back of the line when it comes to volunteering to help out.

Mathew Simmons is a billionaire Texas energy investment banker and a fully paid up member of the Bush White House petrocracy.

Colin Campbell is a geologist and another prophet of doom with a 50 year long association working for the shadowy PetroConsultants of Geneva. A company owned at the time by the Nazi backing Thyssen and Rockefeller families.

Oil-related academia will largely be connected to western Big Oil interests and as a body of academics my guess is they're running about 50 years behind most of their counterparts in the Former Soviet Union, who will have nothing to do with the "fossil fuel" hypothesis.

The media Mr Watson doesn't say which media, but we know that some of the mainstream media primed and covered the event, so I assume he mean them. Are they left-wing does anybody know?

 

[bigfish]

Does the Earth re-fuel itself?

http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/zones/sundaytimesNEW/business/business1115100901.aspx

By Ciaran Ryan

Every 10-year-old knows that oil comes from the decomposed remains of dinosaurs, a theory first floated by Russian scholar Mikhailo Lomonosov in 1757.

According to this theory, rock oil forms over millions of years from the action of heat and pressure on animal remains buried in sediment. The so-called "fossil fuel" theory remained largely unchallenged for 200 years until Russian academics, led by Nikolai Kudryavtsev, suggested that hydrocarbons (from which oil derives) are generated deep within the Earth from inorganic materials.

The notion that petroleum is abiotic (not related to living organisms) in origin has been accepted as scientific fact in the former Soviet Union for 50 years, yet Western science clings to the contradictory fossil fuel theory.

This is no idle academic debate.

If the Russians are right, oil regenerates deep within the Earth and there is no looming fuel shortage.

If the fossil fuel theorists are right, then oil is a finite commodity and the pumps will run dry within a few decades.

 

[888]

Yeah but Russian scientists were sent to gulags for believing in things from genetic heredity to resonance structures in molecules, so there are problems with Russian science up until 1990 at least. It's quite possible that the theory of biotic oil was thought to contradict dialectical materialism and suppressed.

Anyway it's accepted that *some* hydrocarbons can be created abiotically, but generally believed that this accounts for a minute fraction of all oil. However, forming a solid opinion on this will take a lot of reading scientific papers rather than quotes of peoples' opinions and dodgy political sites.

 

[slaar]

Huge survey in The Economist this week which is quite good. Takes on the criticisms of Campbell, Simmons et al and gives a critical look at them; worth a look. They reckon the "faith in technology" assumption is more vulnerable than some kind of global "Hubbard's Peak", a position I think they justify quite well and that I agree with.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Hmm, looks like the online version is subscription only for the story you mean assuming it's the one called - "The Real Trouble With Oil"

The others that are free are also interesting though.

 

[bigfish]

Saudi reserves may be as high as 1 trillion barrels say EIA

http://www.navhindtimes.com/stories.php?part=news&Story_ID=05076

Washington May 6: Saudi Arabia is likely to become even more critical to the world’s oil needs in the coming decades and its reserves may be big enough to meet global demands for the next century, says UPI, quoting a US think tank.

“Saudi Arabia is a key petroleum exporter and central to a steadily more interdependent global economy ... This situation will not change in the foreseeable future,” says a new report from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies here.

The strategic implications to be drawn from the report appear clear - the continued safety and stability of Saudi Arabia will remain a priority goal for major industrial nations dependent upon continued supplies of high-grade, easily-accessible petroleum for decades to come.

“Most estimates indicate that Saudi Arabia holds roughly one-quarter of the world’s proven oil reserves, with a nominal figure of 261.90 billion barrels,” the report says.

According to the Energy Information Agency (EIA) of the US department of energy, the desert kingdom “may contain up to 1 trillion barrels of ultimately recoverable oil,” says the report titled ‘Global Energy Demand and Capacity Building in Saudi Arabia’s Petroleum Sector’ by analysts Mr Anthony H Cordesman, Nawaf Obaid and Mr Khalid al-Rodhan.

It further notes: “Saudi sources have recently gone much higher. On December 27, 2004, Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi stated that the country’s proven reserves can go up to 461 billion barrels in the next few years.”

The report, however, cautions that this is not a guaranteed development.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I think it's important to note where oil production slips first and where it slips last.

Non-OPEC supplies (ie what the US mostly tries to use in preference) start to fade before OPEC supplies. The US is actually banned by its own laws from being in the oil business at all in: Iran, Sudan and until recently, also Iraq.

China and India both have burgeoning needs due to growth, and are very active in securing new supplies and cheaper supplies wherever possible.

Europe is investing to some extent in reducing demand, but not effectively.

The last OPEC supplies to fade will be the biggest ones: Saudi, Iran, Iraq.

After that the phenomenal investements and environmental costs to use coal and unconventional oils (tar sands, shale oil, heavy oils, bitumens) kick in. Most of those resources are in four countries Canada, Russia, Venezuela and the US.

The pessimists say non-opec conventional has peaked around 2003
The optimists (excluding deus ex-machina theories) around 2020

The pessimists say world conventional will have peaked by around 2015
The optimists (excluding etc) say the global peak will be around 2040

As demand is rising, the peak is the important figure because it is the point at which supply cannot meet demand, which is steadily growing year-on-year.

 

[bigfish]

Will ‘running out of oil’ mean the end of civilisation as we know it? The answer is no it wont, simply because power generation is switching to gas of which there is at least two hundred years worth available.

Professsor Peter Odell’s essay ‘The Global Energy Market in the Long Term: The Continuing Dominance of Affordable Non-Renewable Resources’ addresses this issue extremely well by pointing out that the fuel of the 21st century is increasingly gas not oil:

“Natural gas supplies are thus indicated to continue to expand to 2090, when global production is predicated output 5.5 times its year 2000 level. On the other hand, as oil’s output is anticipated to start slowly declining from the 2050s, its contribution to the total hydrocarbons supply ultimately falls from its year 2000 contribution of 65 per cent to 44 per cent by 2050 and to under 29 per cent by 2100".

In other words, for about the next one hundred years or so, energy supplies will actually increase and this is without other sources of energy being developed. It also assumes that energy consumption will increase at its current or at an even higher rate.

 

[Good Intentions]

Power generation isn't all of it, bigfish. Agriculture is the most pressing non-power concern, as well as transport and production. While LNG can certainly be used for this, it isn't as conventinet or cost-efficient, and when LNG has to be used for all of these ends (+-20% of LNG in Canada is used for production already, for instance, my quick Google search showed) we once again reach a point where supply can't keep up demand enough to keep energy prices low. Because all oil running out isn't the immidiate problem - energy not staying as cheap as it is catastrophe enough.

All of this has been covered before ion this thread.

 

[bigfish]

Oil Reserves Are Increasing

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/crispin8.html

Roger Andersen, an oceanographer and executive director of Columbia’s Energy Research Center proposed studying the behavior of this reservoir. The underwater landscape around Eugene Island is weird, cut with faults and fissures that belch gas and oil. The field is operated by PennzEnergy Co. Andersen proposed to study the action of the sea bottom around the mountain and the field at its top and persuaded the U S Dept of Energy to ante up ten million which was matched by a consortium of oil giants including Chevron, Exxon, and Tex Corp. This work began about the time 3-D seismic technology was introduced to oil exploration. Anderson was able to stack 3D images resulting in a 4D image that showed the reservoir in 3 spatial dimensions and enabled researchers to track the movement of oil. Their most stunning find was a deep fault at a bottom corner of the computer scan that showed oil literally gushing in. "We could see the stream," says Andersen. "It wasn’t even debated that it was happening."

Work continued for five years until funds ran out and they were unable to continue. With the world having 40 years of proven reserves in hand it is difficult to interest the major oil producers in much exploration, let alone something done merely for research, and so far from the current accepted theory of a fossil origin for oil.

Similar occurrences have been seen at other Gulf Of Mexico fields, at the Cook Inlet oil field, at oil fields in Uzbekistan, and it is possible this accounts for the longevity of the Saudi Arabian fields where few new finds have been made, yet reserves have doubled while the fields have been exploited mercilessly for 50 years.

Not only can the doom and gloomers not show us running out of the natural resources we recycle, but now there appears to be good odds of a limitless supply of petroleum working its way up to where we can capture it.

 

[888]

Will ‘running out of oil’ mean the end of civilisation as we know it? The answer is no it wont, simply because power generation is switching to gas of which there is at least two hundred years worth available.

Let's hope we stop using CO2 producing energy sources very soon.

 

[Dr Jon]

Just spotted this article:

“There’s a worldwide energy crisis around the corner,” Chavez told reporters at the end of the first Summit of South American-Arab Countries in Brazil.

“Especially because the US and other developed countries, but more so the US, have built a way of life based on the wasteful consumption of oil, which is non-renewable.”

 

[bigfish]

Let's hope we stop using CO2 producing energy sources very soon.

Like you, I'm all for making the world a cleaner and healthier place for us all to live in by cleansing the environment of harmful pollutants. But I think the right way to go about this is by standing up and telling people the truth and not by peddling "Peak Oil" doomsday myths based on the pseudo science and mumbo jumbo coming from people like Colin Campbell, Jean Leherrere and Mathew Simmons - all of whom have had a long and no doubt profitable association with Big Oil.

 

[Slash]

...peddling "Peak Oil" doomsday myths based on the pseudo science and mumbo jumbo coming from people like Colin Campbell, Jean Leherrere and Mathew Simmons - all of whom have had a long and no doubt profitable association with Big Oil.

And let's not forget this guy too.

Although he's launching a book too.

 

[bigfish]

And let's not forget this guy too.

Although he's launching a book too.

Yes, there's a lot of money to be made out of peddling doom and gloom to the terminally gullible... preachers have been doing for donkey's.

David Goodstein: Oil is hydrocarbons that grew up in the earth when source rock full of organic inclusions sank to just the right depth—not too little and not too much—and got cooked over the ages. It took hundreds of millions of years for the world’s supply of oil to be created...

Goldstein's phantasmagoric Disney production of a subterranean world where bio-mass on the way down waves hello to "cooked" petroleum on the way up, is obviously aimed at reconciling the "fossil fuel" hypothesis with the second law of thermodynamics - which it glaringly violates. Central to the ongoing deception is the concept of absolute scarcity supposedly fixed by the amount of biological matter laid down in sediments millions of years ago.

Dismissal of the Claims of a Biological Connection for Natural Petroleum.

 

[bigfish]

The Peak Oil Debate Ii: Economics

http://www.howestreet.com/story.php?ArticleId=1194

The economics of this situation are more complicated than with other commodities, since oil is so central to our lives, but we can be certain that it is not just supply and demand that are controlling prices. We know, for instance, that energy companies have a history of creating artificial scarcities in order to bleed consumers. Enron will naturally come to mind, but Big Oil has been guilty, too. A 2001 FTC report, while absolving oil companies of antitrust violations (only because they didn’t collude with one another), nevertheless noted that they “withheld or delayed shipping additional supply in the face of a price spike… In each instance, the firms chose strategies they thought would maximize their profits.”

Then there is the question of how oil prices are determined. It isn’t, as many suppose, by OPEC. No, as the watchdog group Public Citizen puts it, “Today, prices are determined on international exchanges based on what traders are willing to pay. And who are these folks trading oil and setting the price? Increasingly, they are hedge funds, investment banks, and others out to make a quick buck speculating on the price of oil. And while they're making money, the rest of us are paying for it.

“An increasing share of [oil] trading, however, has been moving off regulated exchanges such as the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and into unregulated over-the-counter (OTC) exchanges. Traders operating on exchanges like NYMEX are required to disclose significant details of their trades to federal regulators. But traders on OTC exchanges are not required to disclose such information, allowing companies like Enron, Exxon/Mobil, and Goldman Sachs to escape federal oversight and more easily engage in manipulation strategies.”

And an official 2003 U.S. Senate report stated: “The lack of information on prices and large positions in OTC markets makes it difficult in many instances, if not impossible in practice, to determine whether traders have manipulated crude oil prices.”

But let’s say fluctuations in the price of oil were simply a matter of supply and demand. It would make sense for Big Oil to attack the supply side, wouldn’t it? Well, actually, no. High demand + short supply (real or not) = greater profit.

Thus, there has been no movement at all on one response that could have a profoundly positive effect on gasoline supply: The construction of new refineries. Hembree Brandon, editorial director of Delta Farm Press, addressed this issue in a paper on the subject: “Not since 1976, almost 40 years ago, has a major new refining facility been built in the United States. That ain't all: As best anyone can tell, no new refineries are on the drawing board in this country. Nada. Zip. Zilch. In 1980, there were over 300 refineries in the United States; at the start of 2004, that number had dropped more than 50 percent to 149. In most cases, the companies said, the closed facilities weren't profitable. Which wasn't the case for 2004, when profits from refining and marketing operations were a significant part of the overall gains by the major companies.” [We’ll say: The domestic gasoline price spread—pump price minus the cost of crude and taxes—jumped by 31% between 2000 and 2004, to 51 cents a gallon. That’s the cut refiners and marketers take.]

Granted, the absence of new refinery construction also has a lot to do with environmental regulations and community resistance (“not in my backyard”), but still, Big Oil has been less than aggressive in pushing for it.

All of which brings us back to the number one supply-side question: What about the potential of abiotic oil?

It’s not as if oil companies are ignorant of the theory. According to Harry Mason, a British geologist with 30 years of worldwide mineral exploration experience, “Many western geo-scientists are aware of the thesis—we were taught the basics at University College London in 1965… [but] the subject is not well funded in the West and thus poorly disseminated in our scientific literature—largely due to deeply instilled negative views in the western oil industry geo-scientific community.”

Okay, what about the idea of not searching for “new” fields, but instead returning to check on wells that previously were capped, for one reason or another? What if abiotic oil is seeping in? Dr. K. K. Bissada, a geochemist for Texaco, said in a 1995 New York Times article: “It's impossible to put a number on the rate at which this goes on, but I could imagine that this kind of stacked reservoir system, with favorable geographic plumbing between the reservoirs, might refill the upper reservoirs in, say, 10 or 20 years. If we were to go back to some oil field that had been abandoned 50 years ago, we might drill a test well, and we might find fresh oil. The trouble is that that kind of experiment is too expensive in the present economic climate.”

Too expensive, or too threatening to profits? Big Oil constantly reminds us of how costly pure exploration is. Surely test-drilling a few former wells would be a whole lot cheaper.

In sum, it would seem that oil is either a rapidly dwindling fossil fuel, or a renewable, inorganically created, essentially unlimited resource. We don’t pretend to know which. But in the absence of an open national discussion, it may come to pass some day that the oil companies, after squeezing the last penny from our wallets, will come to us and say, “Oh, yeah, by the way, we’ve got this other source…”

 

[laptop]

Can someone give a one-line summary of what bigfish is on about here?

I seem to recall a posting on one of the interminable 9/11 threads where bigfish indicated that because of miffedness over people's scepticism over holographic planes and so on, bigfish was convinced that peak oil was some kind of conspiracy and therefore oil must come from non-biological sources.

Typical conspiracy-theory "reasoning" in other words: come to your conclusions, then seek texts that appear to support them. Repeat when those texts are challenged. The Russian/Ukrainian paper linked appears to follow this model.

 

[bigfish]

Typical conspiracy-theory "reasoning" in other words: come to your conclusions, then seek texts that appear to support them. Repeat when those texts are challenged. The Russian/Ukrainian paper linked appears to follow this model.

I've taken a look back through the thread to try and find these "challenges" you say have been made to the paper I provided debunking the "fossil fuel" hypothesis written by J. F. Kenney, F. Shnyukov, V. A. Krayushkin, I. K. Karpov,V. G. Kutcherov and I. N. Plotnikova; and you know what, I can't find a single post by anyone that comes remotely close to matching your description... I can only conclude therefore that you are either hallucinating or that you are a liar.

As I said to you on a previous occasion, it's obvious that you resort to labeling people as "conspiracy theorists" only in order to mark out the boundaries of what YOU have arbitrarily determined to be "reasonable discourse". Can I ask, will you now be attacking me for identifying the existence of a ruling elite who control among other interests all of the western oil giants and so can easily afford to buy the services of any number of quack academic 'experts' of a similar stamp to yourself?

 

[totaladdict]

just thought i'd post this article that butchers posted on another thread:

http://www.metamute.com/look/articl...tion=1&NrIssue=29&NrSection=10&NrArticle=1480

"This anti-Bush paradigm, though correctly appealing to anti-imperialist fervour and ecological anxieties, is problematic since it poses the question as a matter of 'oil dependency' and not of the inevitable consequences of the present system of commodity production. It does not recognise that: oil is a commodity (not a thing); the oil industry is devoted to making money profits (and not producing oil); the US government is essentially involved in guaranteeing the functioning of the world market (and not in the energy 'security' of its citizens); and energy politics involves classes in conflict (and not only competing corporations and conflicting nation states). In brief, it leaves out the central players of contemporary life: capitalists and workers."

[...]

"The problem with the debate concerning the hypothesis is simply that although the geological reasoning Hubbert used is compelling for predicting oil use, the class consequences of such reasoning are far less compelling.

For the 'Peak Oil' hypothesis is now becoming an early 21st century justification for an attack on pensions, wages and workers' guarantees in the so-called advanced capitalist countries."

[...]

"Thus this hypothesis is an even more pernicious tool in class struggle than the energy limitation ideology of the 1970s. But the apparently logical connection between the 'end of cheap oil' and reduced wages and working class expectations is simply a mirage. The hidden assumption of Peak Oil ideologists is that increased energy prices (for corporations) inevitably require a reduction of the wage rate instead of a reduction in the profit rate. In other words, Peak Oil politics assumes that the working class will finance the transition from cheap to expensive oil come what may. Given the present configuration of class forces in the US, this assumption is perhaps a good bet, but it is a far from necessary outcome....."

 

[laptop]

http://www.metamute.com/look/articl...tion=1&NrIssue=29&NrSection=10&NrArticle=1480

Skimmed and bookmarked.

Some points to be going on with;

• The "Peak Oil" that Caffentzis is attacking is the "Peak Oil National Security Paradigm" - the argument put to the US working class (whatever that is) that they have to support wars of aggression, otherwise they'll not have oil.
• "Oil is not a thing, it is a commodity". Yes. Said wars are interventions in the market.
• D'oh! It is in the oil corporations' financial interest to stymie all development of alternative energy, so that they can extract the maximum rent from the oil fields to which they hold licences, as scarcity starts to bite.
• That would include opposition to Kyoto, not because it reduces consumption of oil, but because it implies reducing dependence on oil.
• In economists' words, they're not worried so much about Kyoto's effect on demand - that would make more sense if oil were inexhaustible. They're worried about its effect on price elasticity. Their rational economic strategy is, as I just said, to ramp the price of remaining oil just short of the levels where price elasticity begins to bite in the shape of recession. The development of alternatives significantly lowers those levels.

Those are just first thoughts. I'm not yet sure I believe them, but I have myself convinced for the moment.

 

[bigfish]

The Wolf Report: Nonconfidential analysis for the anti-investor

http://thewolfatthedoor.blogspot.com/

3. But None for You....

Cash assigned for oil and gas exploration, excluding the cost of unproved acreage, by the FRS participating companies declined for the second year in a row, down 21% from 2001 levels. While expenditures for finding reserves declined, the FRS companies increased funds for developing already proven reserves. The development expenditures rose 5% , achieving their highest number since 1982.

In the classic manifestation of overproduction rather than reserve depletion or scarcity, high prices lead the energy majors to bring their areas of known reserves into production; to favor development over exploration.

The energy majors continued to focus on the US offshore area, continuing the pattern first established in 1992. US onshore, despite the age of its fields, still receives more exploration expenditures than any single foreign area. Worldwide, the US energy majors continue to spend the most for exploration in Canada and Africa.

4. And More Than Enough for You..

The reserve replacement ratio, (reserves added in relation to volume extracted) measured 1.04 (104 %), a 9% increase over 2002. Even this, however, was below the 1.25 ratio of the 1990-2001 period.

Despite the reduced capital spending, despite the focus on developing only proven acreage, replacement rates exceeded production.

5. Old News is New News... Supply Meets Demand, Prices Soar.

The 2003 financial performance of the energy majors, as reported in 2005, continued throughout 2004. In the fourth quarter of 04, net income for the FRS companies exceed 4Q03 levels by 101 percent. For all of 04, net income was 54% higher on 26% more revenue.

The petroleum sectors, (oil and gas production and marketing) registered a year-on-year increase in net income of 93%, based largely on a 30% increase in prices. Worldwide supplies increased 4%, as the actual reserves of oil continue to defy the peak oil theories. Again.

 

[bigfish]

Stage Set For PetroChina Overseas Expansion

http://sg.biz.yahoo.com/050610/15/3swtd.html

HONG KONG (Dow Jones)--China's largest oil company, PetroChina Co. (PTR), said Friday it will acquire a large part of its parent's overseas assets for US$2.5 billion, in a move that sets the stage for its international expansion.

Hong Kong- and New York-listed PetroChina will form a 50/50 joint venture with parent China National Petroleum Corp., or CNPC, to hold the bulk of CNPC's foreign assets - although significantly these won't include CNPC's substantial holdings in strife-torn Sudan. The purchase will be in cash, funded through internal resources.

PetroChina said the acquisition should help it achieve the "strategic objective of becoming a more internationalized oil company with significant oil and gas assets." As matters stand, the bulk of PetroChina's assets comprise mature onshore oil fields in China, with only 1% of its oil production coming from overseas sources, namely Indonesia.

At a news conference, PetroChina Chief Financial Officer Wang Guoliang said there are more than 10 new oil projects under discussion for the joint venture company to develop. "A couple of these could happen this year," he said.

The focus of the expansion will be South America, Africa and the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Central Asia.

"All of CNPC's future overseas assets will be developed by the joint venture platform," Wang said.

 

[Backatcha Bandit]

$60