Weekly Review

You and I use a lot of energy. Every second of each day and night we devour 100 times more energy than we need to live. If I were to eat that much energy as food, I would be a 50-foot long bull sperm whale, weighing 40 tons. There are 300,000 sperm whales worldwide, half of them bulls (females are much smaller), and 300,000,000 Americans (females are about the same in size). Our Earth cannot feed and protect 300,000,000 male sperm whales. She is simply too small.

Our voracious appetite for energy must be either extinguished or quenched with local sources of energy (and, no, wind turbines and PV cells are too small to provide even a single ample energy meal per day).

In his recent column in the New York Times, Michael C. Lynch shows that he does not grasp the crucial difference between crude oil reserves and supply (“Drilling for an Oil Crisis”, February 24, 2011). Demand and the rising cost of getting oil out of the ground are apparently not important in his “don’t worry be happy” message that the plentiful oil of the past will continue into the indefinite future.

For him, reserves are all that matter. The fact that reserves usually take years of drilling and complex negotiations before they become supply escapes him. Of all the oil discovered in the last decade, less than 3 percent has been produced so far (M.K. Horn and Associates, Giant Fields Database, 2010). I suppose Mr. Lynch thinks that this is good news for the future, but it does nothing to address today’s soaring demand.

Modern man, the kind with the 1400 cc brain, is said to have been around Continue Reading

The price of oil is once again daily in the news. The western Europe benchmark Brent crude has hovered near $100 / barrel for much of the last month, and the IEA is again warning of the burden of oil consumption. Is this a harbinger of things to come, or a mere statistical blip in a market that is ‘well supplied’? How will events play out in oil markets in the coming year or two?

Certainly, oil prices have surged on the back on strong demand, of which some is structural, and some transient. The northern hemisphere has seen a strikingly cold winter, leading to increased heating oil usage. And the global economy is recovering from a deep recession, with demand bouncing off the recessionary trough. These are, to an extent, passing events. But in many respects, increased prices fundamentally reflect an oil demand that is increasing faster than supply.

“He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” Continue Reading