Heheh.

The world's shortest Peak Oil article
Jeffrey J. Brown, EnergyBulletin
Three points:

(1) Mathematically, based on the Hubbert Linearization method, the world is now where the Lower 48 and the North Sea peaked and declined (all crude + condensate).

(2) Through July, 2006 (based on EIA Data), the world has produced about 142 million barrels less oil than if we had simply maintained the 12/05 production rate. This is a shortfall of about 675,000 bpd. During this time period, oil prices traded in the highest (nominal) price range in history.

(3) We are virtually certain that all four oil fields currently producing one mbpd or more are in decline (we are certain that three of the four are in decline).

http://www.energybulletin.net/20094.html

Commentary: Underestimating Demand, Overestimating Supply

by Matthew Simmons


At the end of August each year, the IEA updates the past 15 years’ reports with all the latest revisions. I have not had time to check and see how big any revisions have been. What did strike me are the ongoing changes in both demand (which has always been viewed with a great deal of skepticism, that further growth of any magnitude was unlikely) and Non-OPEC supply which has been projected to surge beginning in the 4th quarter of the coming year for the past 15 years.

In retrospect, the best way to review key fundamentals is to look carefully at changes in global supply and demand, and where they’ve come from. Between 1991 and 2005, global demand for oil grew by 16.6 million b/d. More astonishing is that non-FSU demand grew from 58.9 million b/d in 1991 to 79.8 million barrels a day in 2005. In other words, outside the unanticipated collapse of the Former Soviet Union, the rest of the world's oil demand grew by 20.9 million barrels a day in just 14 years (35%; 2.5% per year) vs. the projection by many oil pundits that oil demand growth was certainly slowing down.

In the meantime, non-OPEC oil supply, outside the FSU, grew in that same 14 years, but only by a modest 6.7 million b/d, from 31 to million b/d to 37.7 million b/d. That’s less than 0.5 mbd per year. Too many important regions peaked and went into decline. Had the FSU not been able to grow from 10.4 million to 11.6 million b/d and OPEC grown from 25.6 million to 34.2 million b/d, the world economy would likely have been in very hot water.

Looking forward, if FSU growth is modest and OPEC growth only happens in a handful of countries, and is offset by declines—in Indonesia, Venezuela, possibly Nigeria, Iraq, possibly Iran and perhaps Saudi Arabia—it will be impossible to tolerate any sizable jumps in demand, and certainly nothing of the magnitude that has happened over the past 14 years.

The world of oil turned out very different from what the experts at EIA, IEA, CERA, BP, EXXON and others all thought. All one needed to do to spot these major trends in the past is do a modest amount of homework, evaluating the numbers to spot key trends.

All this would be academic to the world had it not been dealing with oil, the world's most critical and largest energy resource. How we blew the future will be the topic of many books over the next decades!

Matt Simmons is Chairman of Simmons & Co. International, an independent investment bank specializing in the energy industry.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/pages/om/06-4om/McKibben.html  

Small Change

 - by Bill McKibben

Of Mites and Men: that buzzing sound may be a metaphor looking for a place to land. 

A few notes about honeybees, for a lazy summer day with a low, humming buzz coming from the direction of the squash patch: Under ideal conditions, a single colony can produce two hundred pounds of surplus honey a year, the product of visits to as many as 500 million flowers.

Honey is their fuel—a bee gets about 7 million flight miles to the gallon.

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