Burgan oil field has entered depletion phase

New T-shirt
Originally uploaded by heyrog.

Kuwait's Burgan oil field, the second largest oil field in the world has entered its depletion phase. I wonder when Ghawar will start to decline...

oil, peakoil, energy, petroleum, kuwait

King Hubbert's Birthday

Projected Peak Oil Scenario
Originally uploaded by heyrog.

M. King Hubbert was born Oct 5th, 1903.
Ron Schuler's Parlour Tricks: M. King Hubbert

New oil shale technology from Shell: In-situ Conversion Process

We'll see if this pans out: Rocky Mountain News: Shell's ingenious approach to oil shale is pretty slick. If it does work out to be economical at $30/barrel and has an EROEI of about 3.5 then we might be ok after all. However, this columnist doesn't mention rates or scaling all that much. She says that it takes about eight months or so to go from normal ground to when the oil starts to come up and that it dried up, and pretty quickly too, about a year later.

I really hope they can get this to scale and produce at a fast enough rate as it does look a lot more promising than other oil shale recovery methods.

Also, here's some testimony that Terry O'Connor of Shell gave before Congress a few months ago regarding In-situ Conversion Process: Committee on Resources-Index

Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy

I recently got this book: Amazon.com: Books: Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, but I haven't had time to read it and it's very technical. I think heatkernel has read some of it and can maybe enlighten some of us to its worth.

Boing Boing discovers Peak oil

Boing boing has a post about Peak oil today and it contains a lot of interesting links from all sides of the debate:
Boing Boing: Peak oil article in Rolling Stone

When is the planet going to run out of oil?

Ask Yahoo gets into the peak oil debate. Lots of nice links too: When is the planet going to run out of oil?

Tapes: Enron plotted to shut down power plant - Feb 3, 2005

Privatization is a beautiful thing. :P CNN.com - Tapes: Enron plotted to shut down power plant - Feb 3, 2005

Hubbert's Peak spinoff blog

There've been a fair number of posts on this blog about the so-called End of Suburbia, oil prognostication, oil books, energy in general, and energy geopolitics. I also have a bunch more to say about all these things, so I decided to make a spinoff blog, Hubbert's Peak. Think of it as The Facts of Life while this blog is more like Diff'rent Strokes. Right now, it's more or less a link dump, but it should get better with time. Also, it's a team blog, just like this one (ostensibly at least). So, let me know if you'd like to join. Peace.

TRN's Top Picks: Technology Research Advances of 2004

From slashdot, this article on the top science and engineering advances of 2004:
TRN's Top Picks: Technology Research Advances of 2004:
Lots of cool stuff, including:
"Nanotechnology

The burgeoning field of nanotechnology -- the quest to build devices and materials from infinitesimal metal and semiconductor particles and even individual molecules -- continued its fast pace this year.

A pair of significant developments each had researchers taking DNA for a walk. Scientists at Duke University and the University of Oxford in England put together a series of DNA stations that can automatically pass a DNA fragment from one to the next. California Institute of Technology researchers improved the gate of a bipedal DNA walker originally designed by researchers at New York University from shuffling, with one leg always trailing the other, to leg-over-leg walking.

Nanotubes continue to be a promising nanotech building block. Researchers from the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) found a relatively simple way to manufacture tall, dense, vertically-aligned stands of pure nanotubes. Nanotubes produced using the method are orderly and pure enough for use in medical implants as well as electronics. "


The Energy stories are really intriguing and I hadn't heard of half of these.

Energy research ranges from finding ways to power microscopic machines to developing renewable energy sources for global consumption. Many research teams are working on solar and hydrogen energy systems, and there have been several significant developments this year.
Scientists from Toin University of Yokohama in Japan built a single, compact device that converts solar energy to electricity and also stores the electricity. This is an improvement from today's combination of solar energy devices that harvest the energy from light and batteries that store the energy. The device is also relatively efficient at harvesting ambient light; it could eventually allow people to recharge cell phones, for instance, using indoor light.
Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers found a way to double a solar cell's potential energy production by using the energy of a single photon to move two electrons rather than just one, and researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineered a single material that is capable of capturing more than 50 percent of the sun's energy from across the solar spectrum.
On the fuel cell front, University of Wisconsin at Madison researchers found a way to use carbon monoxide, a fuel cell waste product that ordinarily degrades cells, to produce more energy. Researchers from the University of Minnesota and the University of Patras in Greece devised a way to extract hydrogen directly from ethanol, which is produced by converting biomass like cornstarch to sugar, then fermenting the sugar.

Basic Choices and Constraints on Long-Term Energy Supplies

While I think the following article is a little too optimistic about fossil fuel reserves, it is overall a good summation of a lot of key points. Physics Today July 2004- Basic Choices and Constraints on Long-Term Energy Supplies

There's also an article in this month's issue about Tranforming the Electric Infrastructure, but I haven't had a chance to check it out yet.

The End of Suburbia

If you can possibly make it to this documentary, I would definitely do so. It goes along nicely with The Corporation, a film I mentioned in another post. The reason is that so much of what the modern corporation has done to transform the world in the past century has been enabled by the availability of cheap energy in the form of light sweet crude. The End of Suburbia very clearly lays out the case that the past 50 years in particular have been a one-time "party" fueled by the bubble of cheap petrolium. This "party" is coming to an end in the near future, not because oil itself will run out, but because its production will peak while demand continues to grow unabated. For example, the whole current system of production of consumer goods in mass quantities in China, followed by their transport across the ocean in petrolium-powered container ships and distribution by gas-guzzling big rigs, on roads built by gas-powered heavy equipment, is predicated upon this supply. Not to mention the system of production of food for billions of people (a bloated, unsustainably large population) in which petrolium-based fertilizers and pesticides take the place of human labor. The film is also good at rebutting the polyanna-ish assurances that the free market will compensate and take care of our energy problems. In the case of power generation in North America, the free market's response to growing demand and decreasing output from coal and nuclear has been to build more natural gas fueled plants. The problem is natural gas almost has to be produced on the same continent on which it is used, because of the difficulties of transport. And North America is certainly going to run out of Nat. gas way before the rest of the world. I can't summarize everything here, just advise you to check it out if you can (see the web page linked above for where it's playing). Then start preparing yourself for life in the post Hubbert's Peak age.