Where's the Gas ?  

Chris Vernon at The Oil Drum (UK) has a nice, detailed post on the UK gas crisis. As usual, its not like they weren't warned, but our political leaders seem incapable of doing anything other spinning the news and concentrating on nonsense these days. Someone even has a blog devoted to this single issue.

There are quite a few interesting snippets in the comments, with one poster asking what happened to the predictions last year of a severe winter bought on by the North Atlantic oscillation. Guess that particular prediction of doom wasn't so accurate after all. This years weather worry is a new American dustbowl event.

It's seems clear that business as usual demand will not be met - this will result in demand being cut from industrial customers (the first Gas Balancing Alert of the winter was issued today). These are the heavy gas users such as chemical, fertilizer and glass manufactures but also the largest industrial gas customer, the combined cycle gas turbines (CCGTs). The real sting in the tail of a gas shortage is the impact extremely high gas prices have on the economics of gas power stations. Severe gas shortages could endanger the national electricity supply.

Perhaps the most surprising thing however is that as close as we are to a gas shortage that will at the very least seriously effect industry, costing millions today but also having a longer lasting effect on industrial investment in the UK is that the public aren't being told about it.

If Tony Blair or Malcolm Wicks would record a 3 minute video to be played a few times a night on the major TV channels (Like Silvio Berlusconi did in Italy last month) explaining the problems and asking everyone to turn their heating down just a little bit, have a shower not a bath, ask offices to do what they can to reduce gas and electricity consumption a little the problem might be avoided.

Rigzone reports Gaz De France is in negotiations with the Iranian government over participation in a large LNG development. I wonder how the French vote in any security council resolution over Iran's nuclear program will go (the Russians and Chinese already seem to have extracted their protection money, but I guess it doesn't hurt to have as many players with skin in the game as possible) ?

Rigzone also has a report on legal and regulatory developments in the Chinese strategic oil reserve industry (I'm sure you'll all click on that link straight away), along with a note that hopes are rising that the hostages held in Nigeria may be released.

The Napa Valley Register has a fairly retro piece (well, thats how it feels to me anyway) of traditional peak oil lore up.

The unthinking public continues to be deluded by massive state-corporate propaganda campaigns on all fronts. The deception justifying the illegal invasion of Iraq will surely go down in history as one of the greatest achievements of American propaganda. The anti-Iran propaganda is working, as more than half of Americans think Iran is a threat to their existence. The driving motive of the invasion is to retain American global hegemony by controlling the last remaining significant energy reserves left on the planet. What this means is U.S. planners will attempt to rule the world and destroy the social contract here at home to pay for future imperial wars.

Petroleum geologists are not popular and their warnings of Peak Oil are underreported by the "liberal media." A 2004 meeting of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas in Berlin included representatives from BP, ExxonMobil and the International Energy Agency. A U.K. observer at the ASPO stated "for the record, Ghawar's (the world's largest oil reservoir, located in Saudi Arabia) ultimate recoverable reserves in 1975 were estimated at 60 billion barrels -- by ExxonMobil, Texaco, and Chevron. It had produced 55 billion barrels up to the end of 2003 and is still producing at 1.8 billion per annum. That shows you how close it might be to the end. When Ghawar dies, the world is officially in decline."

Matthew Simmons, CEO of Simmons and Co. International, the world's largest private energy investment bank, believes the Saudis are "out of capacity." Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham concludes, "America faces a major energy supply crisis over the next two decades. The failure to meet this challenge will threaten our nation's economic prosperity, compromise our national security and literally alter the way we lead our lives."

Moving further out into tinfoil terriroty, Reuters has a report about an american "security contractor" arrested with explosives in his car in Tikrit.

The Guardian has a report about retiring US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's warnings of the US slipping into dictatorship (and she can blame herself for appointing Bush instead of Gore in 2000 coup). With the chimp's low poll ratings and mid term elections approaching I guess we'll see how just how effective all those voting machines really are.

Linking the words "America" and "dictatorship" is a daily staple of leftwing blogs, which thrive on the idea that Bush administration policies since 9/11 are taking the country ever closer to totalitarian rule. Liberal fears that democracy is endangered by Republicans in Congress are so widespread, so endemic to the jittery political climate in the US, that they hardly bear repeating. It'll surprise no one to learn that another voice was added to the chorus last Thursday, warning that recent attacks on the American judiciary were putting the democratic fabric in jeopardy and were the first steps down the treacherous path to dictatorship.

What is surprising - more than that, electrifying - is that the voice belonged to Sandra Day O'Connor, who retired a few weeks ago from the supreme court. O'Connor is a Republican and a Reagan nominee. Regarded as the "swing vote" on the court, she swung the presidential election to George Bush in 2000.

Why did O'Connor choose such a closed forum to air her thoughts? Why was Totenberg the only reporter present? The possibility that America is sliding toward dictatorship or an unprecedented form of corporate oligarchy ought to be a matter of world concern. And if O'Connor believes what she is reported to have said, surely she owes it to the world to make public the prepared text of her remarks, which so far have the dubious character of the scores of unverifiable leaks that have passed for news in the compulsively secretive world of the Bush administration. It's unsurprising that, say, Colin Powell chooses to leak rather than speak out, but when a supreme court justice prefers to whisper her fears to a coterie audience, it's hard to avoid the inference that the whisper itself speaks volumes about the imperilled democracy it purports to describe.

It appears that the perpetrator of yesterday's John Howard mea culpa speech hoax was Richard Neville.

There are reports that Afghanistan has far more oil and gas than previously estimated (though the total amounts aren't particularly large, so I wouldn't go blaming the Afghanistan invasion on the thirst for oil).

Two geological basins in northern Afghanistan hold 18 times the oil and triple the natural gas resources previously thought, scientists said Tuesday as part of a U.S. assessment aimed at enticing energy development in the war-torn country.

Nearly 1.6 billion barrels of oil, mostly in the Afghan-Tajik Basin, and about 15.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, mainly in the Amu Darya Basin, could be tapped, said the U.S. Geological Survey and Afghanistan's Ministry of Mines and Industry.

Of course, the tinfoil world has often speculated that the urge to occupy Afghanistan is really based on the desire to control the flow of heroin from the country (restored back to earlier levels now the Taliban, who had largely eradicated it in possibly their only positive contribution to the world, have been forced into hiding in the hills).

I've got no idea if there is any truth to this, though having lived in Hong Kong for a while and read a fair bit of history about its establishment and the British need to balance their massive trade deficit due to their thirst for tea with a corresponding trade surplus based on opium smuggling into China, it doesn't seem entirely out of the question that we (the anglosphere) may have carried on the drug trade ever since. On a semi related note, RI has some speculation that Slobodan Milosevic was assassinated, and that the Balkan wars in the 1990's were about control of drug routes into Europe. This seems far fetched, but who knows (a lot of conspiracy theories about the Kosovo war in particular always seemed like Russian propaganda to me - some of these are even New World Order based, just to show its not just the left and right fringes in the West that are obsessed with the NWO). Commenter starroute outlines some modern parahistory on this subject for those who are interested (I'll just quote a small section):

Oil, arms, and drugs. The three biggest industries on the planet -- and the same people seem to be involved in all of them.

The combination of arms and drugs goes back to when the OSS was supporting local forces in China against the Japanese during World War II, using opium to pay for the weapons. When the Communists took over after the war and kicked out the drug dealers, the CIA was there to set them up in the Golden Triangle and start the trade flowing briskly -- now on behalf of the expelled Nationalist army -- through the Middle East, France, Cuba, and then into the U.S., where it created the 1950's heroin crisis.

All the more disastrous parts of U.S. foreign policy in the decades that followed can readily be seen as arising out of attempts (under the guise of anti-Communism) to protect the drug sources and supply lines -- from support for the Cuban exiles after Castro kicked out the mob and the drug smugglers (with the JFK assassination as a likely by-product) to the Vietnam War itself.

Following the energy crisis of the early 70's, oil gets tangled up in the picture as well. The connections aren't all clear to me, but one crucial link is George H.W. Bush, the Texas oilman who became head of the CIA in 1976. One of Bush's most fervent supporters in his abortive presidential bid of 1979-80 was Ray S. Cline, a former CIA Deputy Director who had also been one of those OSS guys in China running the opium-and-guns operation.

Cline (who died in 1996) and his Center for Strategic and International Studies have been major sources of geostrategic theory -- the line of thought that says whoever dominates the Middle East and Central Asia rules the world. I don't know whether geostrategists like Kissinger and Brzezinski really believe in the necessity of being Genghis Khan, but at the very least it's a convenient cover for messing around where both the oil and the drugs are most abundant.

The TV news at the moment is reporting about death squads in Iraq and the latest massacre, which I'm sure we'll hear more and more of as the central american experience is repeated (until the media doesn't bother reporting it any more anyway). The ongoing carnage even seems to have prompted Billmon to emerge from semi-retirement with ne of his classic pairs of quotes (contradictory couplets ?).

And finally, I checked out the video accompanying the WorldChanging Campaign which contains some great images. The artist, Edward Burtynsky, who made it also has some interesting slide shows online, including ones on oil fields and oil refineries.