Chris Turner writes: Canadian David Hughes is a coal man, a geologist, and he always refers to the holy trinity of fossil fuels whose flames have stoked the past 200 years of industrial growth — coal, natural gas, and especially oil — in that same semi-technical way: hydrocarbons. Hughes has a lot to say about hydrocarbons, mainly how there’s no possible way to keep running the engine of a modern global economy for much longer at the pace we’re burning them. Which is why you felt compelled to join him in the black chill of this late-autumn morning. Because that seems like a pretty big deal.

Dave came right to the curb out in front of your house, your personal chauffeur, because you said you were interested in hearing his talk a second time, and he’ll do his level best to bring his talk to just about anyone who asks. The Talk, he usually calls it, and you can tell it has been a proper noun in his head for a good long while now. Somewhere between that first lecture back in 2002 at the University of Calgary and the 155th, the one he’ll give later today at a Natural Resources Canada research facility outside Edmonton, it became his passion, his quiet crusade, his data-freighted inconvenient truth. …

He’s fifty-eight years old, a married man with a grown daughter and three grandkids whose collective future worries him enormously and fuels the quiet urgency of The Talk. He lives for much of the year on Cortes Island, a remote rural idyll at the northern end of the Georgia Strait, off the coast of British Columbia. Not because it’s a survivalist retreat — though you couldn’t help jumping to that conclusion at first — but because when he first laid eyes on the place in 1977 he knew he’d found his own little slice of paradise. He bought it in 1990, when he still toiled for the Geological Survey in Calgary.

His was a quiet government researcher’s life. Then, in 1995, a major Canadian energy company came calling, hoping to figure out how much natural gas might someday be mined from coal bed methane deposits — an “unconventional” gas reserve. This is how Dave learned that the gas industry was worried there wasn’t enough conventional natural gas left in Canada to feed its pipes indefinitely. His research confirmed those suspicions. (In The Talk, Dave now places Canada’s natural gas production plateau between 2001 and 2006; he supports predictions of a global peak of conventional gas reserves by 2027. He is calmly, logically, witheringly dismissive of rosier scenarios involving unconventional reserves.)

Around the same time, Dave stumbled on the work of Colin Campbell. After thirty years as an oil field geologist, unearthing new pools of crude for the likes of Texaco, BP, and Amoco, Campbell had throughout the ’90s been writing in the press and academic journals, with mounting alarm, about the imminent arrival of peak oil — the moment when humanity will have burned half the planet’s oil reserves, after which an economy driven by the stuff will rapidly (and potentially catastrophically) unravel.

First articulated by Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert in 1956, and expanded upon in the years since by Princeton University’s Kenneth Deffeyes, an ever-growing roster of academics and analysts, and even a few rogue oilmen, peak oil theory was still considered a lunatic fringe notion by the mainstream oil and gas business when Dave started reading up on it. As recently as 2005, well into Dave’s second career as a peak-hydrocarbon prophet, the executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) — probably the most trusted name in fossil fuel reserve prediction — was dismissing peak oil’s proponents as “doomsayers.” Mainstream media coverage, meanwhile, tended to focus on the hard-core survivalist subculture the science had inspired.

Two weeks after you ride along with Dave Hughes for Talk No. 155, though, the IEA releases the latest edition of its annual World Energy Outlook, which predicts a global oil production peak or plateau by 2030. In a video that appears online soon after, the Guardian’s George Monbiot requests a more precise figure from the IEA’s chief economist, Fatih Birol. The official estimate, she confesses, is 2020. Monbiot also inquires as to the motivation for the IEA’s sudden about-face, and Birol explains dryly that previous studies were “mainly an assumption.” That is, the 2008 version was the first in which the IEA actually examined hard data, wellhead by wellhead, from the world’s 800 largest oil fields. Monbiot asks, with understandable incredulity, how it was that such a survey hadn’t been conducted previously. Birol’s response: “In fact, nobody has done that research. And the research we have done this year is the first in the world, and this is the first publicly available data in that respect.” (05/18/09)
more…

European Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs writes: One of the few good pieces of news in the current economic crisis (maybe the only one) is that oil prices have gone from the 147$ a barrel of July 2008 more than 100$ down to less than $50 a barrel on the international markets. However, in the last days we have seen oil prises rising and reaching the price of $58 a barrel for the first time in nearly six months. Nevertheless low oil prices are also good news for gas, since gas prices are normally linked to those of oil. If we remember the difficulties that European fishermen and truck drivers had last year we can imagine what their problems with be if in the middle of an economic crisis they had to deal as well with prices over 100% a barrel.

However, we should not be under any illusion. The current fall of oil prizes is just the consequence of an even more dramatic fall in demand due to economic crisis. I add to that the fears in the financial markets you will understand why investments in futures of any commodity except the safest ones (gold, for instance) are so rare. But the fundamentals that drive the energy markets have not changed. Once the economic crisis is over demand for hydrocarbons will soar again, particularly in the developing world. And some countries are preparing for that. For example the Chinese government has granted a credit to Russian State owned oil companies Rosneft and Transneft $25 bn. against daily supplies of 48,000 tonnes of oil for the next 20 years.

The world is aware that the production of the existing oil wells is decaying and that new discoveries are more scarce and more expensive. Some experts consider that global oil production may have peaked at 84 million barrels a day. The current economic crisis can make the situation worse. The lower prices that we are enjoying now can be in fact bad news. At this price oil producers have been forced to postpone many necessary investments in new production capacity. These investments take decades to be accomplished. In consequence, if the current economic crisis finished and demand recovers we could be facing huge shortage of supplies that can lead to extremely high prices.

How high? According to the Secretary General of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Nabuo Tanaka, oil prices could go up to as much as 200$ a barrel in the next 4 years. A quick look back on the situation of last year when prices were at a mere 147$ a barrel maybe gives an idea of what the consequences may be if the prices goes a 25% higher. (05/18/09)
more…

BBC Technology — Global electricity networks could become smart grids that can help us monitor and control our energy usage, if plans from net firm Cisco take off. The giant US firm, whose technology helps underpin the net, is building a two-way link into electricity grids.

Smart grids would allow devices to communicate with utility firms to give an accurate view of energy use that could cut CO2 emissions by 211m tonnes. Cisco believes the market could be worth up to $20 billion a year.

The basic premise is to link different parts of the electrical grid - from a single home to the largest of power stations - using a customised network based on Internet Protocol (IP). Cisco say the proposal would be a “once in a generation capital investment”. With the rising cost of electrical power and concerns about how that power is generated - especially when it comes to fossil fuels - a number of other firms are also making a bid to modernise the electrical networks.

IBM launched a range of embedded software applications, although these communicate through the regular internet, rather than via the mains; General Electric and a number of new start-up firms are also making bids to capture a slice of the market.

Cisco say its system is different, because it would send the IP data down the power lines themselves, rather than using the internet.

Security is also a factor. In April the Wall Street Journal reported that hackers had penetrated the “US electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system”.

Speaking to the BBC, Neil Harris - Cisco Europe’s head of green IT - said it would be harder for hackers to penetrate the new network. “It won’t make it invulnerable, but as the network is separate from the net is adds a new layers of resilience,” he said. We expect to see a rise in micro-generation, not just in Europe, but round the world, and the smart grid would be able to handle the bi-directional flow of data and electricity.” (05/18/09)
more…

James Howard Kunstler writes: There are plenty of things you can state about the economy past and future with some confidence right now:

• Cheap energy is over and our wishes for alt.energy are currently
  inconsistent with reality, meaning we have to live differently.

• We have to downscale and re-localize our major economic activities:
  food production, commerce and manufacturing, banking, schooling, etc.

• We can’t hope to have a stable money system unless we allow a workout of unpayable debt to proceed.
• Even if we can do this, universal easy credit is a thing of the past.
  From now on, we have to save for the things we want and run our
  businesses and households on accounts receivable.

• Major
  demographic shifts are inevitable as it becomes necessary to let go of
  suburbia and reactivate our derelict towns and smaller cities (and
  allow our giant metroplexes to contract).

• We have to face
  the truth that our major social contracts cannot be met, namely the
  continuation of social security as we know it and probably all pension
  arrangements. We’ll probably have to change household arrangements to
  make up for these losses.

• Health care will have to go
  through a revolution more comprehensive than just changing how we pay
  for it. Like everything else, it will have to downscale, re-localize,
  and become more rigorous.

We’re not going to rescue the banks.
The collateral for their loans is no good and it will only lose more
value. All those tract houses on the cul-de-sacs of America and
scattered on the out-parcels of our tragically subdivided farming
landscape will only lose value, one way or another, in the years ahead.
Right now they’re simply losing inflated cash value — and that has
been bad enough to sink the banks.

In the months and years ahead,
they’ll lose their sheer usefulness as the distances once mitigated by
cheap gasoline loom larger again, and the jobs vanish and incomes with
them, and the supermarket shelves cease to groan with eighty-seven
different varieties of flavored coffee creamers, and one-by-one the
national chain stores shutter, and the theme parks, and the Nascar
ovals, and the malls, and the colossal superfluous cretin-cargo of
consumer nonsense that we’ve been daydreaming in gets blown away in a
hurricane of change that we were not ready to believe in. (05/18/09)
more…

BBC Technology — Shuttle Atlantis astronauts have completed the fifth and final spacewalk to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. John Grunsfeld and Drew Feustel renewed the observatory’s batteries which enable it to keep operating when its solar panels are in shadow. They also replaced a fine-guidance sensor that helps keep the telescope’s gaze precisely fixed on image targets.

In addition, the spacewalking pair fitted three thermal blankets protecting Hubble’s electronics.

Monday’s spacewalk lasted seven hours and two minutes. The servicing mission has been a great success so far.

Difficult to budge bolts and problematic tools have slowed the spacewalkers on occasions but overall they have been delighted with their progress through the list of planned refurbishments.

“This is a really tremendous adventure that we’ve been on, a very challenging mission. Hubble isn’t just a satellite - it’s about humanity’s quest for knowledge,” said Grunsfeld. “A tour de force of tools and human ingenuity. On this mission in particular, the only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible. On this mission, we tried some things that some people said were impossibleÖ. We’ve achieved that, and we wish Hubble the very best.”

Hubble will be released from the orbiter’s cargo bay on Tuesday, with the repairs and upgrades that the mission has accomplished promising at least five more years of observations. (05/18/09)
more…