“Some commentators hope that new technology will lead to important deepwater finds. Some new deepwater areas with giant potential, such as the Perdido Trend in the western Gulf of Mexico, will no doubt be found, but generally, the geology of most deepwater tracts is not very promising.”
– Colin Campbell (founder: Association for the Study of Peak Oil), Noroil, December 1989.
The past week was a bad one for peak oil enthusiasts, as three separate announcements indicated the abundance of undiscovered petroleum.
First, BP announced that it has found a field in the Lower Tertiary basin in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, named Tiber, containing something on the order of 3 billion barrels.
Next, Petrobras announced another discovery in the pre-salt basin, this one Guara, containing about 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil.…
Continue Reading[Editor note: The post is a slightly revised version of what was posted at the Institute for Energy Research website on September 17. The primary author was Daniel R. Simmons, director of state energy affairs. Next week, Michael Giberson will evaluate IER’s defense of the Danish study at MasterResource in light of his own first impressions.]
Energy is critical for our economy and our future, and the real issues deserve to be debated. That is why we appreciated the initial response on the American Wind Energy Association’s website to the recent study, Wind Energy: The Case of Denmark. It appears that AWEA actually read the study and raised some questions related to energy.
The same cannot be said of other responses, such as this blog post from NRDC.…
Continue ReadingWe are used to hearing about how far behind the curve the United States is on energy. Just today, we were reminded that Germany and China will gobble up our future since we have failed to invest in solar and wind technologies, in particular, photovoltaic fabrication plants.
Actually, that’s not quite true. There are quite a number of PV plants in the U.S., just not any using the technology touted by the New York Times reporter.
And as for wind: did you know that “China is going to eat our lunch and take our jobs on clean energy.” That is not true either. Current wind generating capacity in the U.S. is just shy of 30,000 MW, larger than any other country, including Germany (24,000 MW) and China (13,000 MW).…
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