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a community peak oil portal
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| Russian Oil Companies Seek State Loans, Lukoil Says |
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 (Bloomberg) -- Four of Russia's biggest energy companies have asked the government to approve state loans for refinancing debt, said a spokesman for OAO Lukoil, the country's second-biggest oil producer.
Lukoil is seeking between $2 billion and $5 billion to refinance loans, spokesman Dmitry Dolgov said by phone in Moscow today. The other three companies are OAO Gazprom, the world's biggest natural-gas company; OAO Rosneft, Russia's largest oil producer; and TNK-BP, BP Plc's 50 percent Russian venture.
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| U.S. announces 'Biofuels Action Plan' |
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 WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. government officials have released the National Biofuels Action Plan, an interagency plan to accelerate development of a sustainable biofuels industry.
U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer and Department of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said the plan is in response to President George Bush's goal of cutting U.S. gasoline consumption by 20 percent in the next 10 years.
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| Climate change seen aiding spread of deadly diseases |
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 BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) - A "deadly dozen" diseases ranging from avian flu to yellow fever are likely to spread more because of climate change, the Wildlife Conservation Society said on Tuesday.
The society, based in the Bronx Zoo in the United States and which works in 60 nations, urged better monitoring of wildlife health to help give an early warning of how pathogens might spread with global warming.
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DOWN $US10 a barrel one night, up $US4 a barrel the next. Week after week, oil has been unpredictable; you might even say irascible.
Futures contracts were changing hands at $US147 a barrel in July; now analysts are talking somewhere around $US85 as a floor in the coming months. No one really knows for sure, which doesn't do anything to ease investor concern.
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| How Much Oil is Actually Left On This Planet? Should We Care? |
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 According to Dr. Peter McCabe, a world-renowned scientist currently working at CSIRO in Australia, any realistic analysis of future energy sources can only conclude that, barring some complete and miraculous harmony between all the world’s economic superpowers, fossil fuels will dominate our energy mix for at least the next few decades — and we should just accept it.
To get a perspective on where Dr. McCabe is is coming from, it struck me that he is a man who thinks in terms of quadrillions of BTUs and exajoules of energy. His views come from an analysis of global markets and global energy use. To him it probably seems that a grassroots coordinated global effort is beyond the reach of humanity.
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| US oil production at lowest level since 1946-gov't |
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 WASHINGTON, Oct 7 (Reuters) - U.S. crude oil production this year is expected to fall below 5 million barrels per day for the first time since shortly after World War Two, the government's top energy forecasting agency said on Tuesday.
The lower output is due to hurricanes Gustav and Ike, which at one point shut in almost all the 1.3 million barrels a day in oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
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| Coal-fired power generators face new threat from EU carbon emissions curb |
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The future of coal-fired power generation in Europe was called into question yesterday after the European Union backed new laws that would force power companies to pay for all of their carbon dioxide emissions from 2013.
The decision, which could cost the power industry €30 billion (£23 billion) a year and could trigger a steep rise in electricity bills, represents a huge boost for Europe’s renewable energy industry. It also casts fresh doubt over the likelihood of a new £1.5 billion coal-fired power plant being built at Kingsnorth, Kent, by E.ON, the German power group.
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| Alcoa to curb projects as demand slips |
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| something_awfull writes: "Given the sharp decline in metal prices and increasingly soft demand in our key markets, we are stopping all non-critical capital projects, making targeted reductions to match market conditions and are adjusting our manufacturing capacity to meet demand in rapidly changing upstream and downstream markets," chief executive Klaus Kleinfeld said.
... The latest results included a US4c charge, which Alcoa disclosed last month. The company said it would lay off about 660 people by the end of the year at its Rockdale, Texas operations - essentially closing operations there - due to power-supply problems and decreasing demand for aluminium. The company said today it was halting production at the site.
The largest US aluminium producer reported net income of $US268 million ($380 million), or US33 cents a share, down from $US555 million, or US63c a share, a year ago.
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| World needs to rethink biofuels: U.N. food agency |
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 ROME/MILAN (Reuters) - The Western world needs to rethink its rush to biofuels, which has done more harm pushing up food prices than it has good by reducing greenhouse gases, a United Nations report said on Tuesday.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said policies encouraging biofuel production and use in Europe and the United States was likely to maintain pressure on food prices but have little impact on weaning car users away from oil.
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| Renewable Energy for Homes Doesn't Come Cheap |
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As utility costs mount ever higher, Americans now have real options to take home energy matters into their own hands with "green" systems that can pay for themselves in as little as a few years.
Among the choices: wind, solar, geothermal and a "microhydro" option that is potentially cheaper than a year's tuition at many state colleges.
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| Geothermal backers say it's their time to shine |
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'Great to see growth ... It was dead for a long time," one scientist says
RENO, Nev. - An unusual combination of economic and environmental forces have created a "perfect storm" that could help geothermal shed its back-seat status to its renewable cousins wind and solar energy, experts said at an international conference.
One after another, state and federal regulators, oil company executives, investor-owned utility officials and private developers on Monday recited the conditions in play to an overflow crowd of more than 1,000.
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| OPEC exports down 50,000 in 4 wks to Sept 21-LMIU |
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| LONDON (Reuters) - OPEC seaborne oil exports, excluding Angola and Ecuador, fell 50,000 barrels per day (bpd) in the four weeks to Sept. 21 and were down sharply from Gulf suppliers, Lloyd's Marine Intelligence (LMIU) said on Tuesday.
LMIU said oil shipments from 11 OPEC producers, including Iraq, fell to 23.528 million bpd versus 23.582 milllion bpd in the four weeks to Aug. 31.
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| A Gift From the ’70s: Energy Lessons |
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| The presidential candidates claim to see America’s energy future, but their competing visions have a certain vintage quality. They’ve revived that classic debate: the hard path versus the soft path.
The soft path, as Amory Lovins defined it in the 1970s, is energy conservation and power from the sun, wind and plants — the technologies that Senator Barack Obama emphasizes in his plan to reduce greenhouse emissions. Senator John McCain is more enthusiastic about building nuclear power plants, the quintessential hard path.
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| Peak oil, bailout bunk, and the coming recession |
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| by Tom Whipple and Steve Andrews
The concept of peak oil started as a geological theory* that went like this: if you knew the amount of oil produced in the past, the rate at which it was produced, and roughly how much oil remained under the earth’s surface, the theory could help you determine when oil production would likely start declining. Over the years however, proponents and critics alike recognized that more factors than just the size of oil resources and the ease of exploiting them would determine when world oil production would peak and plateau.
In the inimitable words of Frenchman Jean Marie Boudaire, “it ain’t the size of the tank [the resource], it’s the size of the tap.” And a veritable suite of factors can tweak “the size of the tap,” or how fast oil can be extracted or produced.
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| Ryanair boss accuses BA of 'scamming' passengers |
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| Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary has accused British Airways of "scamming" passengers with high fuel surcharges despite the price of oil continuing to fall.
Mr O'Leary claimed BA's long-haul surcharges, at £109 one-way, had risen 40-fold since they were first introduced in May 2004, when the oil price stood at $36 a barrel. The £16 short-haul surcharge has risen six-fold.
"Oil is only three times higher than then," Mr O'Leary said. "But as the oil price falls back down to less than $90, BA are still scamming passengers. Even Air France has had the grace to reduce surcharges."
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