oil

The mag exalts Canada’s potential to become the Saudi Arabia of the north

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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I consider Time to be one of the more forward-looking periodicals when it comes to the environment. But the editors messed up in this week's edition. The June 2 Time carries a breathless feature about the potential petroleum bonanza in Canada's tar sands.

The article's authors are so giddy with the testosterone rush of big-ass earth-moving machines that they forgot what a multifaceted disaster this "bonanza" would be. The magazine quotes tar men in Alberta as they marvel at their own ability to move mountains ... literally.

At one open-pit mine, a manager brags that his operation moves enough dirt every 48 hours to fill Toronto's 60,000-seat SkyDome. "A year from now, that mountain won't be there," he says, referring to a wall of black soil. Some of the biggest trucks on earth, 20 feet tall, carrying 320 tons of dirt in each load, crawl through the "stark landscape of jack pine, spruce and poplar forests" like Tonka toys built for Paul Bunyan.

How intense is the mining?

But soon we will be mad for $6-7 gas

Normally, I would listen to Robert Hirsch and the legendary Charlie Maxwell, over CNBC's "Mad" Jim Cramer. But Hirsch and Maxwell are making headlines for saying $12-15 gasoline is around the corner, based on Maxwell's projection of oil "reaching $180 a barrel in 2015 and $300 a barrel in 2020."

Sorry, guys -- every extra $40 barrel is another dollar a gallon or so at the pump. Don't quite know how they did the math, but they did it wrong.

New pro-LW ad from EDF

EDF has a new ad out supporting the Climate Security Act: The Act does indeed tell polluters they can’t pollute for free — in fact, it offers them $1 trillion [PDF] for their efforts!

Target your peak oil message to your audience

 

Peak oil is all over the place. The cover of the Wall Street Journal, CNN, you name it. The peak has tipped into the consciousness of the world. And those of us who were aware before are going to be fielding some questions. So it pays to have a response ready for the latecomers.

 

It has occurred to me that there must be a simple way of explaining peak oil to everyone -- but most solutions have concentrated on creating a single simple method of explaining peak oil, when what is needed is a highly specialized approach, designed to help people grasp the issue in the most basic terms imaginable. Being a helpful sort, I have undertaken to provide those explanations. Thus, all you need to do is evaluate the person you are explaining things too, and from there, insert the proper explanation, using my handy list.

If the person is a lot like Homer Simpson:

The way to explain it is: "Beer comes from oil. You use oil to run tractor to grow barley. You use oil to run fermenting equipment. You use oil to ship beer to liquor store. You use gas, made from oil, to drive drunk to the store to get beer. No oil means no more beer -- ever."

Small-town politics meets big-time energy crisis

Last night I went to the town meeting where I live, which — well, if you’ve never lived anywhere podunk enough to have a town meeting, you’re missing out. This one was just as I remember them from my childhood, though PowerPoint has replaced mimeographed pages: ambition, exhaustion, confusion, and the one crusty, bearded guy […]

What we don’t know (but think we do) about oil prices might hurt us

Predicting the future is hard. It's so difficult that even teams of analysts using fancy models get results like this:

This isn't back-of-the-envelope stuff. This is the U.S. Energy Information Administration's official prediction for oil prices, circa 2007. According to the "high price" scenario, oil may reach $100 per barrel some time around 2030. But wait: oil was at $127 last week. So, not only was the EIA projection wrong -- it was wildly and completely wrong.

Okay, everyone makes mistakes, even energy analysts. In 2008, the EIA cleaned up its act and produced this forecast:

Saudis/OPEC don’t control the price of oil any more

With Bush going to Saudi Arabia to beg -- again -- for lower prices, the media is gaga over a confrontation that has about as much significance as a Rocky Balboa fight.

Even the venerable NYT just published an article, "Bush Rebuffed on Oil Plea in Saudi Arabia," that opens, "With the price of oil hitting record highs, President Bush used a private visit with King Abdullah to make a second attempt to persuade the Saudis to increase oil production and was rejected yet again."

Unlike the 1970s and 1980s and even much of the 1990s, neither OPEC nor the Saudis any longer control the price of oil.

If any country had a million barrels a day of (sellable) spare oil capacity, they could make more than $100 million a day selling it, even if that much new oil dropped prices 20%, which it probably wouldn't.

Who would sit on that kind of money? Yes, the Saudis are selling over 8 million barrels a day, so they don't really need the money. But if they have any significant excess capacity, it is sour or high-sulfur crude (see the other experts on the full CNBC interview here). Such crude is not currently in demand: "Many refineries are not set up to process such crude because it is more difficult and expensive to refine into products."

Dems and GOP agree to stop filling Strategic Petroleum Reserve

The Senate today approved legislation to temporarily suspend deliveries to the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, by a vote of 97-1. The measure was inserted as an amendment to a flood insurance bill, and was opposed only by Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.). The Energy Department sends 70,000 barrels of oil to the reserve every day, a […]

Why it took us so long to internalize the rise in gas prices

With gas at $3.50 a gallon in April, the U.S. mainstream media is replete with stories of drivers abandoning SUVs, hopping on mass transit, and otherwise cutting back on gasoline. Yet a year or two ago, when pump prices were approaching and even passing the $3.00 "barrier," the media mantra was that demand for gasoline was so inelastic that high prices were barely making a dent in usage.

Which story is correct? I lean toward the more "elastic" view, and here I'd like to share some of the data that inform my belief.

I've been tracking official monthly data on U.S. gasoline consumption for the past five years and compiling the numbers in this spreadsheet. You'll find that it parses the data in several different ways: year-on-year monthly comparisons (e.g., March 2008 vs. March 2007), three-month moving averages that smooth out most of the random variations in reporting, and full-year comparisons that allow a bird's-eye view.

Here's what I see in the data: