Feeling Snarky

I'm doing a lot of pay work and not sleeping that much so I'm reading through the news feeling a little snarky.  Please excuse my the poor behavior I am about to demonstrate.

EU Energy Chief: "Yeah, oil availability is probably down hill from here."

The availability of oil worldwide has already peaked, the European Union's energy chief Guenther Oettinger said on Wednesday.
"My fear is that the global consumption of oil is going to increase, but European oil consumption has already reached its peak. The amount of oil available globally, I think, has already peaked," Oettinger told a news briefing in Brussels.

So back when I was talkin' to ya'all regarding the science of oil field depletion and how this was in our future and I got the response, "The people who do that for a living say supplies will keep on growing for 40 more years."  We'll the appeal to authority isn't working any more.  If you want to talk about peak oil what the authority figures might be telling you in another 5 years, drop, bring some good coffee and donuts (Apple Fritters please) and we'll talk about it.

National Geographic

According to the 25-year forecast in the IEA's latest annual World Energy Outlook, the most likely scenario is for crude oil production to stay on a plateau at about 68 to 69 million barrels per day.

For this most likely scenario Iraq triples production and tar sands everywhere are scooped up and boiled in about every drop of fresh water there is.  So guess what?  The IEA is still only acknowldging what it has to and doing backflips to put lipstick on a pig.

60 Minutes seemed to go out of their way to make it sound like fracking shale for natural gas was going to save us all.  Last time I checked i couldn't buy Natural Gas at my local BP station (owned and operated by a nice local couple) and even if I could I could not buy a car to put it in.  Please, do not get me started on how long it takes to swap out the car fleet or adapt current vehicles to run on natural gas.  People who are defaulting on their home loans and collecting unemployment don't have cash for that.

Oh, and then there are the natural and financial realities beneath the spin.

What they miss is that production decline rates are so high that, without continuous drilling, overall production would plummet. There is no doubt that the shale gas resource is very large. The concern is that much of it is non-commercial even at price levels that are considerably higher than they are today.


Recent revisions to SEC rules have allowed producers to book undeveloped reserves that questionably justify development costs based on their own projections in public filings. New reserves are being booked at the same time that billions of dollars in existing shale gas development costs are being written down because the projects are not commercial. Concerns about the logic of ongoing gas-directed drilling while prices collapse have been partly diffused by a shift to liquids-rich plays like the Eagle Ford Shale in Texas. These new ventures, however, produce significant volumes of gas which is partly why gas prices continue to fall.

And lets not forget that in an age where we all burn oil to get to work and to get food to our tables, the financial lives of BILLIONS are held hostage by any small group with guns and the training to use them.

An armed attack and kidnapping on a Nigerian oil facility owned by Exxon Mobil Corp. disrupted production Monday, providing the latest sign of how a fraying government amnesty deal with militants has posed fresh risks for energy companies operating in the oil-rich nation.

Gunmen in five skiffs with powerful motors attacked Exxon Mobil's Oso platform late Sunday, according to a security executive who works in the area and had seen an internal report on the incident. They boarded the platform and "conducted a room-to-room search. Crew and staff were beaten and robbed, the power supply was cut and communications were damaged," according to the security executive.

Eight Nigerian crew members were kidnapped from the platform, according to a senior industry executive familiar with the situation. It wasn't clear if there were other crew members who weren't kidnapped.

Exxon declined to say how the attack would affect output at one of Nigeria's biggest oil fields. It suspended Oso's production as a "precautionary measure," the company said in a statement. The field can produce the equivalent of 100,000 barrels of oil a day—as much as 5% of the country's daily output.

Thank you, dear reader, for that chance to vent.  It is time that I return to some pay work and I feel better able to give it my full attention.

I'm going to talk about the current Euro Crisis in another post, probably tomorrow.  The short version, however, is that the dollar is likely to gain in value in the short-term.  Some among the establishment of both political parties will suggest that this proves that our own current account deficiets or the growing debt do not matter.  Setting aside our sense of exceptionalism, however, I think it will find that it demonstrates just the opposite.

But let me find at least one uplifting something to leave you with.  As Mama said and continues to say, "This too shall pass."