The Oil Drum

General Dispersive Discovery and The Laplace Transform


This is a guest post by WebHubbleTelescope.

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The Impact of the Credit Crunch on Energy Markets

The credit crunch is already having an impact on energy markets. New projects are harder to fund. Highly leveraged companies are sometimes finding it necessary to shed assets. Some players are finding themselves to be the indirect casualties of other players, like Lehman, that have already failed. Long term, we will probably see consolidation and lower production than would have been the case without the credit crunch. Of course, if there is a major recession, it is possible that we won't need as high production.

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How Can We Cut Our Energy Use for Commuting?

How can we cut our energy use for commuting? What methods are working for you? What methods make most sense in our current credit environment? This is mostly an open thread, to give people an opportunity to talk about what is and isn't working for them. If the economy is sputtering, peak oil is around the corner, and hurricane related shortages are becoming more common, these methods are going to more and more important in the days ahead.

Some ideas that have been suggested include:

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DrumBeat: October 2, 2008


John Michael Greer: Cassandra's View

In this setting, the presentations and talk at the conference took on a surreal quality, as though the global civilization we were discussing – the one running out of cheap and easily available fossil fuels – was on some other planet. I’m not at all sure how many of the attendees took the time to connect the energy that provided climate-controlled air, fluorescent lighting, PowerPoint slideshows and overabundant snacks for the conference with the sinking lines on graphs that tracked our world’s rapidly depleting oil, coal, and natural gas reserves. I’m even less sure how many of them traced out those graphs to their logical conclusions and thought through the likely impacts on their own lives; even in peak oil circles, this is surprisingly uncommon.


Some of the presentations, certainly, showed no trace of such reflections. To my mind, at least, the most pathetic of them – and I use this word with its full meaning of “evoking pathos,” not in its current sense as a general-purpose insult – was offered by Christer Lindstrom, a pleasant Swedish businessman who wants to solve peak oil by building countless millions of little four-seat computer-guided monorail cars to replace today’s urban automobiles. No hint of the fantastic capital expenditures needed to build a new transportation grid in cities sprawled across three continents, no reference to the immense burden on the electric grid such a project would impose, darkened his presentation.

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The First Wave Energy Farm of the World...It's About Time...

On Tuesday the 23th of September, the deployment of the first commercial wave energy farm in the world started. A Pelamis unit was towed into the sea, connected to an underwater cable and moored to the sea floor, at a site were it will stay for the next 15 years. The Industry was present at the highest level, as so a Minister and even the Navy showed up with a frigate to join the celebration.

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Some Lessons from Bailout Month

Despite the first rejection of the Paulson Plan, the effort is ongoing in Washington to push through a plan that is likely to be substantially similar to the first one (as far as I can tell, the only changes will be tax cuts and the inclusion of the renewable energy bill items). Given the overwhelming pressure to "do something", and despite warnings that we are being rushed for no reason into a terrible plan, it is rather unlikely that the final version of the plan is going to be very satisfactory. In any case, the following will hold true irrespective of the outcome of the Paulson Plan.

(Note: This was written for the European Tribune this week-end, ie before the rejection of the plan by Congress, and before the most recent bank bailouts, but its conclusions stand)

  • the consequences of the financial crisis are so dire that the lesson here should not be that a bailout is necessary (it is, at this point) - but to acknowledge that the financial sector has the power to hold the rest of the economy to ransom during both good times and bad times and thus that it need to be emasculated so that we never get again to the stage where a bailout is necessary. The lesson is that the financial world cannot behave responsibly, if left to its own devices and thus should not be left to its own devices;

  • another is that the main argument to give financial markets a free hand — that they have created so much growth and prosperity — needs to be called for what it is: a lie. Not only the so-called prosperity of the past year was highly unequally shared (see the next point), but it was not even real, as the income and profits of the good years are now dwarfed by the losses of today. Arguments about growth need to be dismissed by a reference to the "full cycle," i.e. the prosperity of the recent past can only be accepted as real if it wasn't a capture of the prosperity of today and the near future. If the forthcoming growth and GDP numbers are dismal, this should be seen as a direct proof that the growth of the past was nothing but, and that the policy prescriptions focused on financial profit are abject failures;

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DrumBeat: October 1, 2008


Time to bet on an oil crunch: Oil prices will keep rising, says billionaire investor Richard Rainwater - and he's putting money on it.

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Back in May, when oil was at $129 per barrel and rising, billionaire investor Richard Rainwater did something as prescient as it was shocking: He sold off all the energy stocks he owned.


Now he's making another bold move: He's betting on oil again.


A few weeks ago, when the price of oil tested a low near $90 per barrel for the first time in many months, Rainwater decided that he had found the right reentry point. "I reinvested back in the oil business, and it's worked out really well for me," he told me the other day. "I bought Exxon stock under $75. I bought ConocoPhillips under $68. I bought Pioneer Natural Resources under $50. I bought BP. I bought Statoil. I made a big bet on the sector. I bought a lot of stocks back."

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Letter to Garnaut: Implications of Oil Production Decline

This is an open letter from Stuart McCarthy of ASPO Australia in Brisbane to Professor Ross Garnaut, who is conducting a public review "to examine the impacts, challenges and opportunities of climate change for Australia".

Dear Professor Garnaut,

Implications of Oil Production Decline Forecasts for Copenhagen 2009

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From ASPO-USA to MinExpo - a Study in Contrasts

It seems as though I have inhabited two different worlds in the past 24 hours. I went from the relatively small (500 folk) meeting in Sacramento where Peak Oil is viewed as imminent, to the halls of the Convention Center in Las Vegas, where the Quadrennial MinExpo is showcasing the latest machines to over 41,000 folk involved in the Mining Industry. It overflows that very large (600,000 sq. ft) building and extends out into the parking lot.

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DrumBeat: September 30, 2008


Oil Drops Most in 17 Years in Quarter on Economy Woes

(Bloomberg) -- Crude oil futures plunged 28 percent in the third quarter, their biggest decline since 1991, amid concern that slowing economic growth will curtail global demand and as the dollar advanced.


Oil traded within a $56 range in the quarter, reaching a record $147.27 a barrel on July 11 and retreating to as low as $90.51 a barrel on Sept. 16, as long-term supply concerns gave way to forecasts a recession would cause fuel use to drop. The dollar is having its best quarterly gain against the euro.


``It's been one of the wildest quarters I've ever seen,'' said Peter Beutel, president of Cameron Hanover Inc. in Stamford, Connecticut, who has been watching the oil market for 25 years.


Crude oil for November delivery fell $39.36 in the three months ended today to settle at $100.64 a barrel at 2:51 p.m. in New York Mercantile Exchange trading. It was the first decline in seven quarters. Futures moved 5 percent or more on a quarter of the trading days. Oil rose $4.27, or 4.4 percent, today.

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