Is Saudi Arabia Running Out of Oil?

Matt Simmons hopes he is wrong. But if he’s right in his belief that Saudi Arabia’s giant oil fields might already have peaked and could start into rapid decline in as few as three years, somebody better have a “Plan B” ready or there’s no way, he says — absolutely no way — to avoid a world energy cataclysm. Pretty strong words. Stronger, perhaps, than any uttered before about energy. Simmons spoke them, and more, at a July 9 Washington, D.C., presentation made at a meeting on Saudi Arabia’s future. The Hudson Institute sponsored the meeting. Simmons asked for anybody, including the Saudis themselves, to refute his claim. But so far, in his view, nobody’s stepped up. He acknowledges, however, that the Saudis recently have been more forthcoming about their ability to supply all the extra oil the world will require from Saudi fields. But still, it appears that nobody is willing to counter his specific charges.

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  thanks to The Agonist

The One-Month Pregnancy

There is a growing realization that we are heading into troubled water, and that this time we won't have the oil to pour on it (sorry, couldn't resist). The recent Federal Energy Information Administration report that the supply will be short 700,000 barrrels a day, due to the Chinese increase in flow to their strategic reserve, suggests that the crisis will indeed become dramatically evident during the fourth quarter of this year. There are a number of suggestions that can be made as to ways the extra demand might be met, and how new technologies may be developed to spring into the breach. There is also the fallback positions that either "The Government knows all about this and will take care of it," or "where there is a need technology always finds an answer.' My usual response to the latter is that you can't have a baby in a month by making nine women pregnant. Technological innovation takes time, and the introduction of new answers must be validated through steps that are each of significant temporal length.

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Rethinking the Axis of Oil
Can America ever kick the oil habit? Not if Congress and George Bush have their way, but the ground is shifting

FOR six decades, one of the few fixed stars in American foreign policy has been the special relationship with Saudi Arabia. Bluntly put, America has offered military protection to the Saudi royal family in return for the free flow of relatively cheap oil from the desert kingdom. Every president since Franklin Roosevelt has stuck by this deal, and the Saudis have mostly done so as well. Within the OPEC oil cartel, the Saudis are usually the voice of moderation. Alas, things seem to have gone wrong on George Bush's watch. Despite his family's famous closeness to the Saudi rulers, oil prices have shot past $50 a barrel, up from barely $10 in 1998. The price of gasoline, which Americans still expect to cost just a buck a gallon, now touches $3 in some places.

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  thanks to DANGEROUSMETA!

Why Our Food is So Dependent on Oil

“Eating Oil” was the title of a book which was published in 1978 following the first oil crisis in 1973 (1). The aim of the book was to investigate the extent to which food supply in industrialised countries relied on fossil fuels. In the summer of 2000 the degree of dependence on oil in the UK food system was demonstrated once again when protestors blockaded oil refineries and fuel distribution depots. The fuel crises disrupted the distribution of food and industry leaders warned that their stores would be out of food within days. The lessons of 1973 have not been heeded. Today the food system is even more reliant on cheap crude oil. Virtually all of the processes in the modern food system are now dependent upon this finite resource, which is nearing its depletion phase. Moreover, at a time when we should be making massive cuts in the emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in order to reduce the threat posed by climate change, the food system is lengthening its supply chains and increasing emissions to the point where it is a significant contributor to global warming.

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  thanks to DANGEROUSMETA!