Bulent Gokay, a professor of international relations in Kelee University, has written a piece entitled "Past peak oil - life after cheap fossil fuels" where he concluded that "the only rational response to the impending end of the cheap oil age is to redesign all aspects of our lives."

Read it all here: Public Service Europe

A new piece about peak oil, entitled "Peak oil - are we sleepwalking into disaster?" has been written by Dean Carroll. Below follows a short teaser and a link to the entire article.

Governments and oil companies have been silent over the ramifications of fossil fuel depletion, but we have now reached the moment for urgent debate on a future without cheap oil. Like climate change, peak oil is often perceived by the more pessimistic analysts as one of those apocalyptic conundrums where we are already past the tipping point – meaning that any solutions human ingenuity can deliver will simply mitigate the worst-case scenario. Certainly, oil-field discoveries have been in sharp decline since the 1970s. And there is a consensus that peak oil has already been reached, at some point between 2004 and 2008. This does not bode well at a time when huge emerging nations like China and India are experiencing energy-hungry industrial revolutions. China's economic growth was 11 per cent last year and in India, it reached 9 per cent.

The Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned that curbing rising fossil fuel prices will require significant investments and further development and deployment of renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency, and advanced vehicles. Nobuo Tanaka noted that the renewed debate on nuclear energy could have an impact, not only on climate change but also energy security.

“The age of cheap energy is over,” Mr Tanaka said, speaking at the Bridge Forum Dialogue in Luxembourg on 13 April 2011. “The only question now is, will the extra rent from dearer energy go to an ever smaller circle of producers, or will it be directed back into the domestic economies of the consumers, with the added benefits of increased environmental sustainability?”

Read more: International Energy Agency

The 9th International Peakoil & Gas Conference will take place during 27-29 April 2011 in Brussels, Belgium. In connection, special events in the Walloon parliament (26 April) and European Parliament (03 May) will also be arranged.

Additional information and links can be found in the attached document.

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Many top corporate and political figures gathered in Houston on Tuesday for the annual CeraWeek conference on the outlook for energy, and they got an earful from John B. Hess, chairman and chief executive of the Hess Corporation.

“An energy crisis is coming, likely to be triggered by oil,” he predicted. “Demand is expected to grow on an annual basis by at least one million barrels per day, driven by the developing economies of the world and by a growth in transportation as we go from one billion cars today to two billion cars in 2050.”

The problem, he said, is not that the world is running out of oil. He estimated that while the world has produced one trillion barrels of oil, two trillion more remain in the ground. Meanwhile surplus oil production capacity is three billion to four million barrels a day.

But watch out for the future. “As demand grows in the next decade, we will not have the oil production capacity we will need to meet demand,” Mr. Hess said. “Supply will then have to ration demand, and prices will skyrocket – with the likely outcome of bringing the world’s economy to its knees.”

So where are oil prices going?

Unrest in Libya caused several oil-industry companies to say they were halting output in Africa's third-largest producing country.

Spain's Repsol and Italy's Eni said they had shut in production. Austia’s OMV also said it was expecting “a temporary reduction” of its Libyan production and “cannot exclude a complete stop”. BASF unit Wintershall confirmed today it was halting output of as much as 100,000 bpd.

A number of companies including BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Suncor Energy said they were pulling out staff, but had not confirmed any production impact. Schlumberger, the world's largest oilfield services company, was shutting down operations in Libya. Chief executive Andrew Gould cited "disturbing" events in Libya, which accounts for 1% of Schlumberger's overall revenue.

Opec member Libya is Italy's biggest oil supplier and covers about 10% of its natural gas needs through the underwater pipeline Greenstream, controlled by Eni. Eni said gas supplies from Greenstream were suspended but also that it could meet demand from its clients.

Read more: Upstream Online

The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show. The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels – nearly 40%.

It also reported major project delays and accidents as "evidence that the Saudi Aramco is having to run harder to stay in place – to replace the decline in existing production." While fears of premature "peak oil" and Saudi production problems had been expressed before, no US official has come close to saying this in public.

Jeremy Leggett, convenor of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security, said: "We are asleep at the wheel here: choosing to ignore a threat to the global economy that is quite as bad as the credit crunch, quite possibly worse."

Read more: The Guardian

Brian Cohen, a investment fund analyst, has examined the connection between oil and gold and how this may affect the world. Considerably higher oil prices are coming to the world at the worst possible time. Not only is the world far from being ready with oil alternatives when demand is on the brink of surpassing production, but this is happening at a time when the world economy is in danger of implosion caused by massive debts. The perilous fiscal situations around the globe make it even tougher to make the right long-term decisions surrounding energy.

Read the full article here: Safehaven

IEA executive director Tanaka told reporters on the sidelines of an industry conference that Opec "needs to show more flexibility" in increasing oil production according to Reuters. "If the current price continues, it will have a negative impact," he said. Oil hit a record $147 a barrel in 2008 and there are fears that prices could rise significantly above $100 if Opec does not signal its intent to lift supplies.

Nonetheless, United Arab Emirates Oil Minister Mohammed al-Hamli downplayed the IEA’s concerns, saying that fluctuating oil prices were not a cause for concern. "The price keeps going up and down and all I can say for now is that we are happy," al-Hamli said. The minister claimed markets continued to be well supplied and added he expected positive growth in demand going forward.

Read more: Upstream Online

A new scientific article by Richard Miller from Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC) has been published in Energy Policy. It deals with the changing stance of the IEA regarding future oil supply.

Abstract:
The IEA was established in 1974 with a mandate to promote energy security amongst its members, namely the states of the OECD, and to advise those members on sound energy policy. Its recent forecasts of the medium and long term prospects for oil supply, however, have wavered, alternating from optimistic to pessimistic and back again. For policy-makers, such inconsistency is difficult to deal with. Firstly we examine whether the changing outlooks seen in IEA forecasts made between 2007 and 2010 truly reflect a demonstrable, underlying change in the known facts, and we can find no such factual changes reported by the IEA. Secondly we examine whether the serious criticisms of the IEA's (2008) forecast made by other analysts have yet been addressed, and we conclude that they have not. Thirdly we consider the possible effects of the current economic downturn upon the IEA's assumptions and upon future oil supply.