Random Notes  

The August ASPO newsletter is out. Key pieces include a note on declining offshore oil finds (which would make TAP's touted billion barrel prospect off WA by far the best for the year if it turns out to be real) and a country assessment for Bolivia.

Oil prices have risen well over US$60 a barrel again after a number of different supply disruptions, presumably accompanied by some jitters about King Fahd's death.

Crude oil futures in New York shot up more than a dollar to top $61 a barrel, building on earlier gains as supply disruptions piled up. The latest catalyst was the shutdown of a 120,000-barrel-a-day North Sea oil field run by U.K. oil giant BP PLC (BP), which also reported an explosion late Thursday at its Texas City refinery. The supply snags follow a fire reported Thursday at Murphy Oil Corp.'s 120,000-barrel-a-day Meraux, La., refinery. The refinery glitches have helped release oil futures from days of lackluster trading, but whether the market will hold the gains is questionable, as U.S. petroleum supplies are at above-average levels.

Daniel Yergin's latest article in The Washington Post claiming that oil production will grow to 100 million barrels per day in 2010 has been criticised by The Oil Drum and Jim Kunstler. Where is the growth coming from ? Offshore platforms apparently (so the decline in offshore finds noted by the ASPO may be indicating an offshore production peak coming soon as well). What eats offshore platforms ? Heavy weather.

Heading Out looks at why the Yergin (CERA) view differs so much from Chris Skrebowski's analysis for ODAC in "CERA meet ODAC". In summary - CERA seem to just add projected new production figures to current production to get their future totals. ODAC subtracts depletion for existing fields from the total. SO CERA figures say everything is fine and ODAC figures say we're headed for a production decline.

Richard Heinberg has a new Museletter out called "How to avoid oil wars, terrorism, and economic collapse".

Alexander Downer is claiming that ASEAN wants to join the new US / Australia led Kyoto alternative that has no CO2 emissions targets. Why is anyone taking this parody seriously ? I know the coal mining industry makes lots of money but you could save a lot of hot air by taking the Exxon approach and just refusing to acknowledge global warming rather than pretending that you want to do something about it. Energy Bulletin has a roundup of other responses.

Bill McKibben has a new article out on Cuba's post-oil agricultural system called "The Cuba Diet - What will you be eating when the revolution comes ?".

In true Soviet style, the Cubans were demonstrating a deeply held (and to our eyes now almost kitschy) socialist belief that salvation lay in the size of harvests, in the number of tractors, and in the glorious heroic machinery that would straighten the tired backs of an oppressed peasantry—and so I learned that day that within thirty years of the people’s uprising, the sugarcane industry alone employed 2,850 sugarcane lifting machines, 12,278 tractors, 29,857 carts, and 4,277 combines.

Such was communism. But then I turned a corner and the pictures changed. The sharply focused shots of combines and Olympians now were muddied, as if Cubans had forgotten how to print photos or, as was more likely the case, had run short of darkroom chemicals. I had reached the gallery of the “Special Period.” That is to say, I had reached the point in Cuban history where everything came undone. With the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba fell off a cliff of its own. All those carts and combines had been the products of an insane “economics” underwritten by the Eastern bloc for ideological purposes. Castro spent three decades growing sugar and shipping it to Russia and East Germany, both of which paid a price well above the world level, and both of which sent the ships back to Havana filled with wheat, rice, and more tractors. When all that disappeared, literally almost overnight,

Cuba had nowhere to turn. The United States, Cuba’s closest neighbor, enforced a strict trade embargo (which it strengthened in 1992, and again in 1996) and Cuba had next to no foreign exchange with anyone else—certainly the new Russia no longer wanted to pay a premium on Cuban sugar for the simple glory of supporting a tropical version of its Leninist past.

In other words, Cuba became an island.