Peak Oil- what it is and how it will impact your life

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January 2000​

occurred and via green pricing programs where restructuring​

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has not occurred.
The National Wind Coordinating Committee was formed
in 1994 by the American Wind Energy Association, Electric
Power Research Institute, Edison Electric Institute, American
Public Power Association, and the U.S. Department of
Energy (DOE). The committee intends to plot an orderly
path for the development of a self-sustaining commercial
market for wind power.​

The Federal Role​

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The federal government provides technical assistance for​

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the development of wind energy through DOE’s Wind Energy
Program, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s
(NREL) National Wind Technology Center, and Sandia
National Laboratories.
The Energy Policy Act of 1992 (EPACT) established a
production tax credit of 1.5 cents per kilowatt-hour
(adjusted for inflation) for electricity produced from
facilities brought on line between January 1994 and July
1999. The credit can be used for the first 10 years of the
facility’s existence. Qualification for the tax credit will expire
on December 31, 2001.​

State Experiences with Wind Power​

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California​

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Wind energy in California produced about 1.5 percent of​

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the state’s total electricity in 1997, more than enough to light
a city the size of San Francisco. More than 13,000 of
California’s wind turbines, or 95 percent of all of California’s
wind generating capacity and output, are located in three
primary regions: Altamont Pass (east of San Francisco),
Tehachapi (southeast of Bakersfield), and San Gorgonio (near
Palm Springs, east of Los Angeles). The roughly 3 billion
kilowatt-hours produced each year by California’s wind
turbines displace 2.1 million tons of CO2 that would
otherwise be emitted by fossil fuel power plants.
In 1995, these areas produced 30 percent of the world’s
wind-generated electricity. Much of this capacity was installed
during the 1980s, and almost all was planned, financed,
installed, and operated by independent power producers—
companies not affiliated with utilities. Most of the California
wind capacity was installed in response to federal and
California state legislation that provided a favorable market.
The federal production tax credit is expected to increase
California’s wind power capacity as older, less-efficient​

For More Information​

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The ​

National Renewable Energy Laboratory operates the​

National Wind Technology Center ​

and other wind-related

programs for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Tel: 303-275-3000
Website: http://www.nrel.gov/wind/​

Sandia National Laboratories​

, located in Albuquerque, New

Mexico, has been involved in renewable energy technologies,
including wind, for more than 20 years.
Tel: 925-294-3000 and 505-844-3441
Website: http://www.sandia.gov/Renewable_
Energy/wind_energy/homepage.html​

DOE’s ​

Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Network​

provides information on wind energy.​

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Website: http://www.eren.doe.gov/RE/wind.html​

The ​

National Wind Coordinating Committee provides a forum

for identifying issues that affect the use of wind power.
Tel: 888-764-WIND or 202-965-6398​

Website: ​

http://www.nationalwind.org​

The ​

American Wind Energy Association is a national trade

association that represents hundreds of wind energy member
companies and advocates from the United States and around
the world.
Tel: 202-383-2500
Website: http://www.awea.org​

EPA’s State and Local Climate Change Program helps states​

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and communities reduce emissions of greenhouse gases in a
cost-effective manner while they address other environmental
problems.
Website: http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/ and click on
“Public Decision Makers” under the “Visitors Center.”​

BENEFITS OF WIND ENERGY​

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• Reduced emissions of greenhouse gases, air pollutants,​

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and hazardous wastes.
• Reduced reliance on imported energy.
• No risk of fuel price hike.
• Increased local job and business opportunities.
• Quick construction with option to build in phases
according to need.
• Contribution to local economy through payment of
property taxes and land rents.
turbines are replaced with modern, larger, and taller units that
generate 35-40 percent more electricity.​

Minnesota​

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The U.S. Department of Energy reported in 1991 that wind​

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energy in Minnesota could produce 657 terawatt-hours (625
trillion watt-hours) of electricity annually from about 225
gigawatts of wind energy capacity. Most of that capacity is
along Buffalo Ridge, a geological formation that runs through
portions of Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Iowa.
Commissioned in 1994, the Buffalo Ridge Windplant
produces 25 megawatts of pollution-free electricity for sale to
Northern States Power Company, a major Minnesota utility,
under a long-term contract. Northern States Power secured
approximately 2,000 acres of privately owned land under
easement for construction of the Phase I wind towers. Corn
and soybean crops continue to be grown and harvested in the
fields surrounding the turbines.
An additional 107 megawatts were commissioned in 1998,
and another 175 megawatts in 1999. State mandates for clean
power production will result in a total of 425 megawatts of
new wind power plants by 2002 and 400 megawatts more by
2012. By that time, the region’s wind plants will be capable of
producing a total of 825 megawatts of electricity. This would
offset approximately 1.7 million tons of CO2 emissions from
fossil fuel power plants annually.​

A study conducted by Pacific Northwest Laboratory found that 20% of America’s electricity (560,000 kilowatt hours) could be provided by wind farms located on less than 1% of the land in the contiguous 48 states. Less than 5% of that land would be occupied by wind support structures, equipment or access roads. Generally, one turbine needs less than an acre of land.


Germany remains the world leader with 18,428 MW of installed capacity. Spain is second with 10,027 MW of installed wind energy capacity, the United States is third with 9,149 MW, India is fourth with 4,430 and Denmark, which gets 20% of its electricity from the wind, is in fifth with 3,122 MW. The European Union hopes to increase its use of renewables to 22% by 2010, with much of this coming from wind power.

 

Re: Peak Oil; what it is and how it will impact your life

We need to be developing every source that we can. Wind and solar are our best hope in the foreseable furure of offsetting some of the coming energy crunch.

I am all for being proactive on things that are proven. It is the hope and faith in unknown factors that I see as a dangerous trend. Depending on science to come up with an as yet unknown cure or oil companies to suddenly discover vast unknown fields is to me a recipe for disaster.

It's the old survivalists motto "Prepare for the worst, pray for the best."

 

Re: Peak Oil; what it is and how it will impact your life

I sincerely hope that deep water drilling produces some good finds. More work for me. I saw a documentary of old Aramco hands discussing the future of the oilfield and one guy said "someday they will develop a submarine that can sit on the ocean floor and drill, that is the next frontier for oil exploration."
I would love to see that. I would volunteer in a heartbeat. But I just don't believe in putting too much hope in it. It may be a great bonanza or it may end up a money pit. And it could end up to be a case of too little too late.

Debate Over Deep-Water Oil Exploration Heats Up In Mexico
by Peter Millard
Dow Jones Newswires 3/7/2008
URL: http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=57967

As Mexican oil production wanes, a heated debate is emerging over how to go about scouring deep areas of the Gulf of Mexico for new reserves.
The country only has nine years left of proven oil reserves, and the Energy Ministry has warned that exports could dry up in less than a decade unless the industry boosts investment in new areas. That would tighten world oil supplies and strip Mexico of its biggest cash cow - Mexico relies on oil for more than a third of state revenue.
State oil company Petroleos Mexicanos says deep water is the only solution.

"We need to start working on deep water so that in 10 years we have the reserves to replace the fields that are currently declining," Pemex Chief Executive Jesus Reyes Heroles said in a statement Thursday.

Pemex estimates that 55% of Mexico's prospective reserves lie in deep waters, where the company has only recently started to explore.
The company launched a television ad this week saying it needs to obtain technology from other oil majors to rapidly develop the hydrocarbon treasures lying dormant in the Gulf.

Not so fast, said Francisco Rojas Gutierrez, a former Pemex chief from the early 1990s.
"Its risky," he told lawmakers at a forum on Thursday. "We can't rule out deep water at some time, but the solution is near the coast, in shallow water and on land."

Rojas said there is no proof of the vast deep water reserves that Pemex anticipates, adding that it takes twice as long and 10 times as much money to develop in deep waters.

 

Re: Peak Oil; what it is and how it will impact your life

I've commented before that my business is bittersweet. When the economy is struggling and oil prices are high that is when I am in the best shape financially. When the economy is good and prices are low, I am struggling. Right now is the best conditions I have seen since the 70's for oil industry workers. Especially someone like me with 30+ years experience.


Talent Void a Top Five Business Issue for Oil and Gas Executives

Ernst & Young 3/12/2008
URL: http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=58192

Nearly 90% of senior human resources (HR) executives at 22 top international oil and gas companies believe their industry faces a talent shortage and call the problem one of the top five business issues facing their companies. Working with Rice University, Ernst & Young LLP recently surveyed HR executives in the oil and gas industry to glean insights on the challenges of workforce recruiting and retention and how to overcome these challenges. Nearly all (88 percent) of the respondents agreed the shortage has the potential to impede growth and financial performance.
Respondents were asked to rank the following issues on a one to 10 scale, with 10 representing a significant problem: corporate growth as a result of inability to staff projects was given an average score of 7; financial performance due to rising costs scored 6; innovation scored 6; operations/safety scored 6; and corporate reputation scored 5.

"It is clear that the talent void in the oil and gas industry has transformed from an organizational challenge into a critical business issue," said Dina Pyron, a leader in the Human Capital practice within Ernst & Young's Global Oil & Gas Center. "The lack of key talent could potentially impact corporate growth, financial performance, safety and reputation. This should raise a red flag to leadership that immediate and innovative solutions are necessary."

Some new approaches to turning the tide on the talent shortage include focus on the next generation. Ernst & Young suggests looking beyond Baby Boomers and focusing on recruiting and retention strategies designed for Gen X and Gen Y.

According to the findings, the greatest threat to recruiting and retention is competition from counterparts within the industry. Respondents ranked competition from peer companies an eight out of 10, with 10 representing a major challenge. Also nearly unanimous was the industry's response to the problem: increased compensation. Eighty-eight percent of respondents cited increasing compensation as their primary solution to keeping and attracting talent.

"Compensation is important, without a doubt, but the survey results show there is a real opportunity to do something different, stand out from the competition, lure new recruits and create loyalty among existing employees," said Bill Lee, associate dean of executive education for Rice University. "The first company with a break-out strategy could position itself as the leader in a highly competitive recruiting and retention environment."

Show me the money!!!!!



I wouldn't have suggested going into this business a few years ago, but the outlook for the future is looking very good. Especially compared to other industries that are struggling in this rapidly declining economy. The median wage for starting level positions is averaging around $20 an hour. And before anyone starts PMing me for leads, I am an independent contractor, I don't hire anyone. If you have young men who are looking to make a good income then look at the yellow pages in any major city in an oil producing state and look up "Oil Well Drilling Contractors". Don't bother applying to Oil Companies, they don't drill wells, they hire a contractor to drill them. Some of the largest domesticaly are Nabors, Helmrich and Payne, Noble, Pride, Patterson, and many others.

 

You make a really good point. The reason fuel prices are so different around the nation is largely because of taxes. The federal Government taxes it then the states get thier cut and the cities have thier slice of the pie. IIRC, the oil companies share of a gallon of gasoline is about 60%.
And of course that is not profit, you have logistic costs to subtract from that. So that means that with $3 a gallon gas you are paying $1.20 in taxes.

The people in Hawaii paying $4 a gallon would only be paying about $2.40 if the .gov would get thier fingers out of the pie.

But you never hear the prostiticians saying that they need to reduce or eliminate the taxes to help out the working man. No they will raise the taxes on the oil companies producing it, which of course gets passed down to the consumer and results in higher prices.

Then we have a major catch-22 in that if these new risky and expensive exploration projects are successful and find significant new discoveries, reducing the price of oil, then it wouldn't be feasible to continue exploring for it in those areas.

A lot of these naysayers quote figures and prognostications of decades of oil left. That may be true, but how expensive will it be? Peak Oil is not about running out of oil, it is about running out of CHEAP oil. Those days are behind us, for good. we will never again see $1 a gallon gasoline. No matter how many new fields come on line in the future.

The next time you hear these politicians bemoaning the "obscene profits" that the oil companies are making don't be fooled by thier smoke and mirror tactics. Oil companies are making more money than ever before, of course, but they are spending more than ever before to keep the oil flowing also. The costs of these "enhanced recovery" methods, these risky ventures into unknown areas, and yes (albiet good for me) the rising cost of expeienced personell, all are taking a huge bite out of those "record profits". Profits which by the way pale in comparison to the Medical industry, the pharmaceutical companies and others. The oil industry, even with these "obscene profits" only ranks #5.

This punish the oil companies, thier gouging us rhetoric is successful only because of the ignorance among the general poulation as to how the oil industry works.

For example when the Exxon Valdez oil spill occured there was a loud call to ban drilling in Alaska and in offshore waters.

I would give people this scenario;
You have a farmer growing tomatos, he hires a trucking company to transport his crop to market. The semi-truck driver is drunk, the truck has bad brakes and there is an accident on the interstate. The truck overturns and spills tomatos all over the highway. It is a huge mess and takes a lot of money to clean up. We don't want that to happen in the future so what do we do? Let's pass a law that the farmer can't grow anymore tomatos. That is absurd. We wouldn't do that, we would pass laws that insured that the trucking companies inspected thier vehicles, tested thier drivers. We would want safer trucks and more competent drivers, we wouldn't punish the farmer for growing tomatos.

Yet that is exactly what was proposed in the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. And millions of people were saying "yeah that's the solution."

The transportation industry (the oil tankers) were responsible for having faulty equipment, unproffesional employees, and were directly liable for that spill, yet the cry was to punish the drilling industry who has nothing whatsoever to do with transportation. Ridiculus.

So when we hear the politico's saying let's punish the oil companies for these high prices, you can look to them for the a good portion of the blame. Taxes, restrictions on drilling in many areas of the country, blocking the construction of new refineries and nuclear power plants. If anyone should be held accountable for our current high energy prices, and be punished for causing them, it should be the politicians in Washington, not the CEO's in Houston.

 

Re: Peak Oil; what it is and how it will impact your life

I was using the formula of 60% per gallon. That I prefaced with " If I Recall Correctly. It may have been 60 cents per gallon profit. I don't keep those kind of statistics close at hand.
So IIRC, Californians were paying what? About $3.10 a gallon last July?
So minus the 63 cents (rounded up from 62.8) of combined taxes according to this report, they could have been paying only $2.48 a gallon if the politicians really wanted to do something to lower prices.

I stand corrected.

And BTW, all through the 80's when you were paying $1 or less per gallon for your gasoline I was struggling to keep from losing everything I had. I was sleeping in my car or if fortunate, living in a motel. I made as little as $12,000 in 1981. I was forced to go overseas in the 90's, for the mega salary of $2,800 a month, in order to have steady employment. Because the American people would rather pay .90 cents a gallon for gasoline from cheap Saudi oil than pay $1.50 for what we could produce here in the U.S.

Our (and I include myself in that) staunch refusal to conserve, our demand for cheap fuel, our "not in my backyard" attitude to new refineries, new drilling, our demanding our "right" to drive oversized gas guzzlers and fuel them with the cheapest fuel possible, has contributed to the situation that we face today.

It's like Pogo said "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

 

Re: Peak Oil; what it is and how it will impact your life

Her's another chart for you. From around the same time


PRICE OF GAS AROUND THE WORLD
Prices
are quoted in US dollars per gallon for regular unleaded.


Hong
Kong

$6.25


London,
UK

$5.96


Tokyo,
Japan

$5.25


New
Delhi,
India

$3.71


Johannesburg,
South Africa

$3.39


Buenos
Aires,
Argentina

$2.09


Chicago, illinois

$3.48



YOU'RE GONNA LOVE THIS ...

Kuwait

$0.78



Caracas,
Venezuela

$0.12



Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia

$0.87


So what is the difference between London, Hong Kong, the U.S. and Kuwait, Saudi and Venzuela? The taxes they pay. That and the government subsidizing and or controling the industry.

 

Re: Peak Oil; what it is and how it will impact your life

Very informative posts S&P. Thanks.

The worst thing that could happen to us is for the government to heed the cry to "do something".

If you think prices are high now, wait until the politicians get involved.

Unfortunately there will always be those who would rather blame it all on a fairy tale than see the real cause and effect reasons and from that the only real solutions.

I saw this from the Washington Post this morning. This is just a snippet of the article.Read it in it's entirety at this link
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/14/AR2008031403677.html


A Crude Case For War?

Five years after the United States invaded Iraq, plenty of people believe that the war was waged chiefly to secure U.S. petroleum supplies and to make Iraq safe -- and lucrative -- for the U.S. oil industry.

We may not know the real motivations behind the Iraq war for years, but it remains difficult to distill oil from all the possibilities. That's because our society and economy have been nursed on cheap oil, and the idea that oil security is a right as well as a necessity has become part of our foreign policy DNA, handed down from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter to George H.W. Bush. And the war and its untidy aftermath have, in fact, swelled the coffers of the world's biggest oil companies.

But it hasn't happened in the way anyone might have imagined.

Instead of making Iraq an open economy fueled by a thriving oil sector, the war has failed to boost the flow of oil from Iraq's giant well-mapped reservoirs, which oil experts say could rival Saudi Arabia's and produce 6 million barrels a day, if not more. Thanks to insurgents' sabotage of pipelines and pumping stations, and foreign companies' fears about safety and contract risks in Iraq, the country is still struggling in vain to raise oil output to its prewar levels of about 2.5 million barrels a day.

"If we went to war for oil, we did it as clumsily as anyone could do. And we spent more on the war than we could ever conceivably have gotten out of Iraq's oil fields even if we had particular control over them," says Anthony Cordesman, an expert on U.S. strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who rejects the idea that the war was designed on behalf of oil companies.

"When we first decided on the war, I don't remember oil playing an important part," says Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser under the elder Bush and a critic of the current president's decision to invade.

But that's because concern about oil supplies is part of the architecture of U.S. foreign policy. Scowcroft notes that oil can't be disregarded because Iraq and its neighbors sit on two-thirds of the world's oil reserves. But oil needn't be mentioned either because it's self-evident.

War critics might call that the perfect conspiracy.

In a sense, though, all Americans are part of that conspiracy. We have built a society that is profligate with its energy and relies on petroleum that happens to be pooled under some unstable or unfriendly regimes. We have frittered away energy resources with little regard for the strategic consequences. And now it's hard and expensive to change our ways.

 

Re: Peak Oil; what it is and how it will impact your life

I got a call this morning from my diesel supplier. We use about 1,500 gallons a day on this drilling rig. He said to give him plenty of advanced notice when we needed a load delivered. The refineries in Chorpus Christi have started rationing diesel. They are only allowing a set number of loads for each supplier per week.

I drive a diesel pickup and I paid $3.79 a gallon in Austin last week.

 

Re: Peak Oil; what it is and how it will impact your life

Man thats bad, it 4.03

 

Re: Peak Oil; what it is and how it will impact your life

Going higher too I'm afraid.

 

Re: Peak Oil; what it is and how it will impact your life

yea, soon there will be lot of cheaper diesel trucks for sale