The head of Norway’s oil agency has sounded the alarm over high drilling costs on the country’s continental shelf that are putting a serious restraint on its ability to tap new reserves to reverse a production decline.

At the same time, offshore operators are delaying drilling due to factors such as a lack of rig capacity and stalling on investments in technology to boost recovery, putting a further brake on reserves expansion, Bente Nyland, director of the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD), warned on Wednesday.

Read more: Upstream Online

The September issue of the American Journal of Public Health is now available online featuring 8 studies and articles by an interdisciplinary set of experts, each examining the health risks posed by peak petroleum and what can be done to mitigate and protect against the onset of a major spike in energy prices.

The studies are entitled:

• Public Health and Medicine in an Age of Energy Scarcity: The Case of Petroleum
• Petroleum and Health Care: Evaluating and Managing Health Care's Vulnerability to Petroleum Supply Shifts
• Petroleum Scarcity and Public Health: Considerations for Local Health Departments
• Peak Oil, Food Systems, and Public Health
• Peak Oil, Urban Form, and Public Health: Exploring the Connections
• [http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/101/9/1607 Peak Oil and Health in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Impacts and P

PetroChina, the Chinese oil and gas giant, saw soaring costs devour much higher revenues in the first half to post a similar profit to a year ago. PetroChina said it piled on revenues in the six months to the end of June despite “a complex macro-economic environment” which saw volatility in oil prices and poor demand for petrochemical products.

The second half could prove even more challenging with the company warning: “The uncertainty and instability of the global economic recovery may become more severe, while the global financial markets and crude prices may see greater fluctuations.”

Read more: Upstream Online

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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	ASPO9.pdf	72.81 KB

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