Letter to the Times

Sir, the Times incorrectly reported that Greenland has 47 billion barrels of ‘estimated oil reserves’ (‘Global warming could help Greenland to independence’, print edition, 7 May), which is wrong on two counts.
Read more »

First published in Petroleum Review, May 2006.

Say what you like about Sir Richard Branson, but you cannot fault his willingness to suffer in the cause of a photo-opportunity.
Read more »

First published in the Telegraph , 3 May 2008

Polishing the portholes on the Titanic hardly does it justice. This week saw ministers giving an uncanny impersonation of Corporal Jones urging calm over the Grangemouth refinery strike; lorry drivers protesting in Park Lane over a two pence rise in fuel duty; and much righteous indignation over the level of profits reported by Shell and BP. All of which entirely misses the point.
Read more »

Doh! I felt such a fool. While checking the manuscript of The Last Oil Shock for the new mass market paperback edition, available from 17 April, I noticed a real howler.
Read more »

First published in the Guardian, 5th March 2008

For weeks South Africa has suffered rolling blackouts caused in part by a shortage of coal. Gripped by unusually bitter snowstorms, China recently banned coal exports for the next two months.
Read more »

Peak oil is not a threat but an opportunity to force through the policies needed to combat climate change, according to London Mayor Ken Livingstone.
Read more »

Sir Richard Branson today claimed aviation could be made “truly sustainable” at the launch of test flight fuelled in part by coconut oil. But the Virgin boss conceded that meaningful supplies of alternative fuel might not be available before the advent of peak oil, which he said could happen within six years.
Read more »

(Podcast) Biofuel can be produced without clearing rainforest, raising CO2 emissions or displacing food production, according to the chief executive of D1 Oils, the British company pioneering oil from jatropha curcas in the developing world. And according to Elliott Mannis, the fuel could even work out cheaper than damaging first generation biofuels.
Read more »

(Podcast) The world will have to suffer a deep economic downturn before serious attempts are made to kick the oil habit, according to the chairman of PFC Energy, the Washington based oil consultancy.
Read more »

First published in International Hydrographic & Seismic Search Magazine, February 2008

The launch of International Hydrographic & Seismic Search Magazine raises an interesting question: have the publishers taken leave of their senses?
Read more »

BP chief executive Tony Hayward stressed the company’s commitment to the North Sea during its results press conference yesterday, saying it would continue to produce there “until we put the lights out”.
Read more »

(Podcast - update) Coal prices are predicted to hit $300 per tonne this week, a threefold rise that eclipses even the most bullish forecasts made just a few days ago.
Read more »

(Podcast) All of a sudden coal, so long the Cinderella of fossil fuels, is not just in demand but in desperately short supply.
Read more »

(Podcast) The real value of oil is “way, way, way above $80” according to a leading analyst.
Read more »

(Podcast) Britain can expect no favouritism from Norway as the European gas market tightens over the next decade. Norwegian supplies will be allocated on a strictly commercial basis, according to Deputy Minister of Petroleum and Energy Liv Monica Stubholt.
Read more »

(Podcast) A high voltage electricity grid connecting countries from the North Sea to the Bay of Biscay could provide almost a third of Europe’s power by 2030, according to the company behind the idea.
Read more »

First published in New Scientist, 17 January 2008

There used to be a joke about taking coal to Newcastle but these days the laughing stock is getting the stuff out.
Read more »

Just as the Financial Times’ news coverage of oil was beginning to improve (“Oil watchdog reworks reserves forecasts”, 27.12.07), Lex goes and spoils it with a truly shoddy analysis: “Peak no evil” (03.01.08) rehearsed all the old myths that have been comprehensively debunked in recent years.
Read more »

(Podcast) Reserves growth in existing oilfields is largely illusory and will not put off the date of peak oil, according to BP’s former Chief Petroleum Engineer.
Read more »

(Podcast) When the oil price soared to over $99 per barrel earlier this year, the cause was not surging demand, nor speculation, nor even impending peak oil, but a forecasting error by the International Energy Agency.
Read more »

First published in Surfer’s Path, November 2007

The two longboards jammed between the hull and the wheel-house seem oddly superfluous. Two miles out in the bay, and sheltered from the choppy Gulf of Mexico by the sandbar of Galveston, the murky green water slaps gently against the hull of our tiny Boston whaler, glinting in the early morning sun. On the face of it the chances of a wave are minimal.
Read more »

First published as $100 oil: the terrible truth in the Guardian, 24 November 2007

As the price of crude oil sets new records almost daily, the British government remains stunningly complacent. With the $100 barrel looming, the prime minister’s website blithely proclaims “the world’s oil and gas resources are sufficient to sustain economic growth for the foreseeable future.” Officials refuse to define what is meant by “foreseeable”, but it is clear they suffer from extreme myopia or worse.
Read more »

(Podcast) Agriculture must localise and convert to organic production methods without delay if the world is to avoid famine, according to a leading thinker on peak oil.
Read more »

First published in the Evening Standard, 9 November 2007

With the markets hypnotized by the approach of $100 oil, analysts are pointing the finger at all the usual suspects: speculators, the OPEC bogeyman, the weak dollar, soaring consumption in China and India, and geopolitical tensions. All play a part but the real cause is altogether less palatable. The world is running short of oil, and this time it is likely to be permanent.
Read more »

There is no contradiction between the International Energy Agency’s forecast of long term oil supply growth to 2030 and a “supply crunch” by 2015, according to its chief economist Fatih Birol. Mr Birol insisted today that the short term crisis would not be caused by a fundamental shortage of oil but by entirely man-made factors.
Read more »

Christophe de Margerie has a reputation for forthright views and blunt speaking, but this week the chief executive of Total excelled himself by dismissing the IEA’s oil production forecasts as unrealistic, while coining an aphorism worthy of Donald Rumsfeld.
Read more »

(Podcast) IEA chief economist Fatih Birol has told lastoilshock.com that the agency will review its use of resource estimates from the United States Geological Survey, in a move that seems certain to prompt a major downward revision of its long term oil production forecast.
Read more »

The world’s proved reserves have been have been falsely puffed up by the inclusion of 300 billion barrels of speculative resources, according to the former head of exploration and production at Saudi Aramco, and this explains the industry’s inability to raise output despite soaring prices.
Read more »

(Podcast) Sadad al-Huseini says that global production has reached its maximum sustainable plateau and that output will start to fall within 15 years, by which time the world’s oil resources will be “very severely depleted”.
Read more »

(Podcast) There are only 1200 days to go until global oil production reaches its all-time peak, according to the editor of the Petroleum Review. Worse, says Chris Skrebowski, the chances are the crisis will break even sooner.
Read more »

(Podcast) When global oil production peaks, the economy is likely to shrink in direct proportion to dwindling fuel supplies, says Dr Robert Hirsch of the thinktank SAIC.
Read more »

By David Strahan. First published in the Guardian, 3 October 2007.

The Irish chapter of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil could hardly have wished for better. On the first day of its recent conference in Cork, the oil price obliged by striking a new all-time high. And in the following days it struck three more in a row.
Read more »

(Podcast) A secretive gathering some of the world’s biggest oil companies has concluded the industry will discover far less oil than officially forecast, according to an executive who attended the event, meaning global oil production may peak much sooner than many expect.
Read more »

(Podcast) For a senior oilman Gareth Roberts holds some fairly unusual views: peak oil is coming soon; crude oil is too precious to burn as transport fuel; and Big Oil should be investing massively in alternative energy.
Read more »

(Podcast) In a sign of just how rapidly peak oil is moving into the mainstream, a report from the World Energy Council has forecast that conventional oil production will peak in the next ten to twenty years. But in an interview with Lastoilshock.com, WEC Secretary General Gerald Doucet insisted that the transition would be “managable” and that total world energy supply would nevertheless double by 2030.
Read more »

(Podcast) Ireland’s Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources has claimed that some form of energy rationing system would be a “common sense approach” to the twin challenges of peak oil and transport carbon emissions.
Read more »

(Podcast) Former US Energy Secretary Dr James Schlesinger today claimed that the intellectual arguments over peak oil had been won, and that in effect ‘we are all peakists now’.
Read more »

By David Strahan and Andrew Murray-Watson. First published in the Independent on Sunday, 16 September 2007

Lord Oxburgh, the former chairman of Shell, has issued a stark warning that the price of oil could hit $150 per barrel, with oil production peaking within the next 20 years.
Read more »

The former chairman of Shell will issue a stark warning about the world’s oil supply at a conference in Ireland later this week. Lord Oxburgh expects that global oil demand will outstrip supply within twenty years as production hits plateau, and that the oil price may well hit $150 in the long term. He accuses some in the industry of having their heads “almost in the sand” about oil depletion, and concludes “we may be sleepwalking into a problem which is actually going to be very serious and it may be too late to do anything about it by the time we are fully aware”.
Read more »

By David Strahan

In a widely viewed You Tube clip, taken from a C-Span interview conducted in 1994, Dick Cheney argues persuasively that the United States was right not to topple Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War. He cites the potential disintegration of the country and the risk of American casualties as good reasons for the decision not to take Baghdad. So what was it that changed his mind by the turn of the century? An acute awareness of impending peak oil.
Read more »

Dear Duncan,

I suppose advocates of peak oil should be flattered that they are now taken seriously enough for someone to launch such a laboriously researched attack as The Battle for Barrels: Peak Oil Myths & World Oil Futures.
Read more »

By David Strahan.

A year ago Tony Blair declared in the Energy Review that securing a ‘sustainable, secure and affordable energy supply is one of the principal duties of government’. He was right. But under New Labour energy policy has veered from criminal to farcical. And with the recent reappointment of Malcolm Wicks as Energy Minister that farce is ready to transfer from Whitehall to the West End stage.
Read more »

By David Strahan. First published in the Independent on Sunday, 15 July 2007.

BP and Shell are finally about to merge. That’s if you believe the tittle-tattle in the Square Mile. Of course rumours that the two giant companies might wed are hardly new and have been the stuff of bankers’ fevered imagination for years. But there is now an increasingly compelling case why the two energy groups should be integrated.
Read more »

By David Strahan. First published in the Guardian, 26 June 2007.

Even as one of the principal architects of the Iraq war washes his hands of the whole bloody mess there is still only a remarkably vague understanding of the real reason behind the invasion.
Read more »

Big beasts of the oil jungle don’t come much bigger than Rex Tillerson, in London last week to give a speech at Chatham House. Usually at such events the bigger the beast the duller the platitudes, but during questions afterwards the CEO of ExxonMobil made some significant remarks that underscored the tightness of oil supply outlook, and effectively predicted the end of non-OPEC oil production growth by 2010.
Read more »

Letter to Prospect, June 2007.

Edward Luttwak’s argument that the Middle East doesn’t matter (The Middle of Nowhere, Prospect, May 2007) is bunk. While some of his points about the chronic Israel-Palestine problem ring horribly true, his willful denial of the real significance of the wider region, and of Iran in particular, is astonishing. To coin a phrase, it’s the oil, stupid.
Read more »

By David Strahan. First published in Prospect, 16 May 2007

In one sense Stern’s conclusions were entirely predictable. He set out to answer the same brutally simple question posed by Dick Turpin: your money or your life. And now that climate change so clearly has a pistol at the head of our species, there could only be one answer – irrespective of cost.
Read more »

By David Strahan. First published in the Independent on Sunday, 6 May 2007.

Is it possible that Lord Browne’s humiliation is not yet complete? It may be hard to credit in a week when he was forced to resign with immediate effect – at a personal cost of £15m – after lying in a witness statement about a lover he met through a male escort agency.
Read more »

By David Strahan. First published in the Ecologist, April 2007.

What is it about climate change campaigners and peak oil – the two words you almost never hear them utter? The idea that global oil production will soon go into terminal decline ought to be a godsend; it makes the kinds of things they have been lobbying for all the more urgent and compelling. Yet most of the big NGOs continue studiously to ignore the idea.
Read more »

By David Strahan. Published at the BBC’s Green Room, 30 March 2007.

It is becoming increasingly clear that global oil production will soon go into terminal decline with potentially devastating economic consequences. Although the idea of ‘peak oil’ has traditionally been ridiculed by the industry, now even some of the world’s most senior oilmen concede the case.
Read more »