Petrogeddon: Oil Terrorism On The Rise

Suicide bombers attack Saudi oil facility

Suicide bombers in two Aramco cars drive into the Abqaiq refinery, which handles about 2/3 of the Saudi oil output and is therefore probably the most important refinery in the world, and attempt to wreck the plant. There's shooting, apparently the plot's foiled, although at least one detonation messed up a pipeline. No news on casualties or damage, as yet. But just the news caused oil to jump $2.

What's interesting is the timing of this attack. Iraq's sliding into civil war and output's down to what it was five months after Gulf War II, Iran's getting threatened with sanctions, and Nigeria's oil production's been cut by a fifth due to the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta's targetting of export terminals and foreign oil workers. Oh, and on a brighter note Shell's just been fined $1.5bn for fucking up the area...

So bear with me. It's fairly obvious that our bombers knew the international situation. Their timing's impeccable - oil's just starting to go down in price as the panic attack over MEND attacks/hostage-taking cools, and then another group targets a major refinery in one of the biggest oil exporting countries in the world. So we're seeing the rise of economic terrorism at just the point where it could really fuck up the world economy.

The MEND people just want their land back, preferably unspoiled. The Abqaiq bombers were trying to mess up the Saudis and their Western allies through trashing the oil economy. MEND I can understand. Abqaiq is pretty much like setting off a nuke - yeah, it'd be interesting to see what happens, but you really wouldn't want to gamble anybody's future on the outcome.

Nuclear TechnoPorn: Getty Images

Oh, but this is great! Getty images have a whole load of stock footage from all those years of US atomic testing. Fair enough, the info's not that good - they've not listed which tests (or even dates) the footage comprises - and they've gone and bloody watermarked the Quicktime files, but it's still pretty amazing.

Favourite so far: the effect of nuclear weapons on a fleet. I'm probably wrong, but this is part of Operation Hardtack. Those ships you see caught in the blast are most likely crewed by experimental animals. Seriously.

It's pretty amazing that something like 2,400 nukes got detonated thirty years after Trinity. Almost like a minature WWIII war game played out with the real thing.

Every time I see some atomic test footage, I get jealous of the guys that were there, that saw and felt the nukes going off. Last of the Cold War Kids, I suppose...

Petrogeddon: The Iran & China Oil Deal

China Rushes to Complete $100B Deal With Iran

Ok, so China's going industrial and it needs a lot of oil now and its going to need even more later. The Chinese have been pouring a lot of money into this, securing links all over the place, and now they're trying to get the Iran deal sorted, worth a potential 300,000 barrels per day.

The Chinese and Iranian governments are speeding this deal through, because very shortly most of the West is going to start hollering for sanctions to be imposed against Iran for uranium enrichment. And as China has the power of veto, oil sanctions against Iran just aren't gonna happen. And there's very little point imposing sanctions against Iran that don't impose upon oil exports.

But it goes deeper. Iran, Iraq, North Korea, pretty much all Bush's 'Axis of Evil' switched to the Euro from the dollar as their oil currency at the beginning of the century. China holds an astronomical amount of US Treasury bills, and if they choose to switch all those to pay for oil in Euros, it's gonna cause some major instability in the world's markets and seriously destabilise the US.

It's in China's interests to make the switch. Hopefully they'll choose the least potentially damaging time, although God knows when that will be.

Petrogeddon: Good News from Iran!

Iran will not use oil as weapon in atomic row

"Iran will not use oil as a weapon because we think it would have a very bad effect on most of the population of the world." - Deputy Oil Minister Mohammad Hadi Nejad-Hosseinian

Now this is the kind of thinking that I like. If they've got a nuclear policy to match, they can enrich as much uranium as they want.

Petrogeddon: The Ostriches Will Not Inherit The Earth

Alan Caruba, Scaring People About Energy

I found this wonderful piece through Google News, syndicated through a few news sites, and it led me to the equally wonderful National Anxiety Center (slogan: the good news is that the bad news is wrong!), founded by Caruba about 15 years ago.

Caruba's great. He really is. A former PR consultant and business and science writer, he's firmly convinced that we're worrying about nothing. A quick scan through his article illustrates just how bad things could be if we took his approach...

Caruba's first point is that we've been wearned 5 times before that the world is running out of oil. I was warned many times as a child that playing in the road was dangerous. The fact that I was never run over does not demonstrate that playing in the road is safe.

The Sakhalin oil fields are given as a point that oil is still being found. Well, true enough. Sakhalin was discovered 30 years ago but only started pumping oil last year. This is in keeping with Hubbert's curve. Caruba fails to mention this. There are likely to be few Sakhalins left now.

And even if there were, US oil consumption is, what, about 20 million barrels of oil a day? So even if Carabua's estimate of the Sakhalin producing 'more than five billion oil-equivalent barrels of energy' in its commercial lifespan was both correct and translated into oil, it would power the US for a whole 250 days. Big freakin' deal. I'm unsure what Caruba's point was, other than the recommendation to drill Alaska.

And then we hit the really good stuff...

As noted, bad news sells.

This is the basis of Caruba's argument, that the media need a scare story to sell their wares. Well, true enough, but it doesn't preclude that it might well be true. I could write off the quagmire in Iraq or even the 9/11 WTC attack as an attempt to increase the sales of newspapers using Caruba's logic.

Americans need to keep in mind that (1) all the oil that exists around the planet has not been found...

Yep. Americans also need to keep in mind that the largest oil fields we know of were all discovered a long long time ago. To find the remaining oil reserves will involve going to the places where oil has not been economically viable to survey and discover, let alone exploit.

The whole worry of Peak Oil is that half the known reserves have been discovered and exploited and that demand will very soon rise above supply. This will drive up prices without increasing productivity, which means that 20 years hence you might well have to make a choice between eating and heating.

...(2) that new technologies will make its extraction possible...

Yep, and once again we're in the territory of diminishing returns. The research, design, prototyping and production of those new technologies will be reflected in the price of the oil from those hard-to-reach reserves.

...and (3) will greatly improve the use of what exists.

Which is wonderful if it happens that way. But once again, we should look at the failure of nuclear power to observe exactly what technology can offer us. 50 years and no solution to the storage of radioactive waste... Or alternatively, the bizarre desire of inefficient SUVs compared to smaller cars - we have the technology to improve the use of what exists, but not the desire or motive to actually purchase it.

Our national energy concern should be focused on oil in terms of the essential role it plays in transportation. Failure to keep our cars and trucks on the road would imperil our economy. Ultimately, all goods move on wheels.

And this is where you start banging your head in frustration. This is exactly why people are worried about Peak Oil, yet Caruba offers no solutions. Instead he criticises Bush for promoting solar and wind technologies, yet if we're generating electricity from these, it leaves a lot more oil to funnel into the transport system.

I dunno, but I find Caruba's piece a hell of a lot more scary than Bush's prior comments.

THE END IS NIGH!!!!

Kenneth Deffeyes reckons that we may well have hit Peak Oil, that point where our industrial society is post-mid-arc in its use of available resources, and I get worried. I thought it was about ten years away, and that was me being pessimistic. Plenty of time to get things sorted... but not anymore. So I think I should really get some info and then work out what to do (which usually just involves me ranting down the pub).

I head down to the bookshop, and find that Peak Oil Armageddon literature is a major growth industry. I wander out with a copy of James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century. It's got just the right kind of cover - bright red, picture of the globe deliquescing off the page - that reminds me of all those Nuclear Apocalypse self-help guides you used to get in the 1980's.

I'm currently halfway through, but I can't help but notice that in the last ten days since Duffeye's piece appeared, things seem to be going really quite fast. We've got Bush's State of the Union pledging to end the US's addiction to oil, which is worrying just for the fact that this is the representative of a huge oil cartel talking. And I think it's maybe just an aside, a warning.

But then we get more. "The dependence upon oil is a national security problem and an economic security problem," Bush said publicly during a two day trip to see how the US alternative energy industry was faring. This is worrying, especially if you're outside the US.

The solutions are even more worrying. Bush thinks that active solar power - the type that turns sunlight into electricty - should be competitive (presumably to oil) by 2015. If it can be done, and having read Kunstler's opinion on solar electricity I'm not sure it can, that's all well and good. But exactly how are these solar panels going to be deployed? How big a battery would you need to power, say, street lighting at night? What happens when you have a month of overcast sky? Are we all going to have solar panels on our houses for home use, and if so, will this not cause millions of redundancies as the electricy comapnies close down?

Bush seems to think that technology will answer the crisis. As a case in point, nuclear electricity was supposed to bring in an era of cheap electricity in the 1950's. And it did. The only problem was that nobody had a freakin' clue what to do with the radioactive waste it produced. And half a century later we still don't. And that's why solar energy is being touted rather than nuclear - because technology doesn't solve political problems, and Peak Oil Armageddon will be almost completely a political problem.

Bush, and the oil companies he represents, know that our petroleum driven culture is about to go tits-up this century. "I think we're in an important moment in history," Bush said. "We have a chance to transform the way we power our economy and the way we lead our lives."

It's interesting how this is currenly being presented to the public as a 'choice'.