[Peakoil-announce] FW: [TransportAustralia]

[Magarey Paul]

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED 

fyi
 

Paul Magarey
p: 02 6274 7338
e: paul.magarey at dotars.gov.au



 

________________________________

From: TransportAustralia at yahoogroups.com
[mailto:TransportAustralia at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Alan Parker
Sent: Tuesday, 26 July 2005 11:21 AM
To: TransportAustralia at yahoogroups.com
Cc: Alan Parker
Subject: Re: [TransportAustralia]


Hi all, 
the book by Simmons "Twilight in the Desert: the coming Saudi oil shock
and the world economy" has been reviewed see below. 

There is also a new DVD on oil depletion which would be useful to show
DOI personnel. 
see below. 

bye Alan 


NewDVDpeakOil 
New Peak Oil / Oil Crisis documentary DVD available in UK & Europe 
By James Howard Pressbox.co.uk 
http://www.pressbox.co.uk/detailed/Society/New_Peak_Oil_/_Oil_Crisis 
_documentary_DVD_available_in_UK_Europe_31765.html 

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes. 

Peak Oil: Imposed by Nature is a new documentary that will be available
from Friday 15th July throughout the UK and Europe via the website
www.PowerSwitch.org.uk. 

Produced by Amund Prestegard and recommended by Dr Colin Campbell, it is
an excellent introduction to the causes and consequences of the terminal
decline of global oil production as we reach Hubbert's Peak, expected in
2007. 

In the documentary, Dr Colin Campbell takes us to Stavanger in Norway,
where he has worked the last 10 years of his professional career. He
explains the different aspects of discovery and production, the increase
and decline, and the fact that this will happen very soon. Dr Campbell
serves as our 'guide' throughout the documentary, although he is just
one of the many informed and informative analysts that feature. 

Richard Webb is a financial risk analyst with broad experience from some
of the world's largest investment banks. He expresses his opinion about
signs that the market is reaching an extremity, and that this endorses
what Colin Campbell and the ASPO are saying: we are near the peak. Webb
underlines the importance of understanding that the dramatic event is
not when we will run out of oil, but rather what will happen when there
is less tomorrow than there is today. 

Norwegian petroleum geologist Olve Torvanger has 30 years of worldwide
experience in seismic surveys, searching for oil. He points to the
seriousness of a situation in which our tools become ever more
sophisticated, but we are finding less and less. 

Matthew Simmons is Chairman and CEO of Simmons & Co. International, one
of the world's largest energy-investment banking firms. He expresses a
deep concern for the urgent need to take measures to prevent the decline
that shall destroy our society. He refers to the word "crisis" as "A
temporary problem that has been left unattended so long that it has
become permanent"! 

Aage Figenschou, Norwegian board member of Simmons & Co, expresses worry
regarding the downgrading of reserves by oil companies. He believes that
we are near the peak, but underlines that it will not make people run to
fill up their cars. What we will see, he says, is a constant pressure
towards ever-higher prices, a rather negative outcome. 

Chris Skrebowski, Editor of Petroleum Review in London, argues the case
for a much stronger involvement from Government that could go as far as
deciding who can - and who can not - have [access to oil]. The
Government, he claims, will find themselves monitoring a war-like
situation. 

Investigative reporter Michael C. Ruppert expresses his views on Dr
Campbell being approached by US intelligence in his own village in
Western Ireland. Ruppert claims that what the CIA most of all wants to
know is "how close is the ASPO to penetrating the public consciousness
with the issues of PEAK OIL and how close is the public to acknowledging
what it's going to mean." According to Ruppert, the so-called "war on
terrorism" is nothing but a war to control the last remaining oil
reserves on the planet. 

US president George W. Bush frets over the fact that the US now imports
over half of their crude oil, and that very often they import that from
countries that "don't particularly like us" and "that it could
jeopardize the national security to be dependent on sources of energy
from countries that don't care for America - what we stand for, what we
love." 

The Producer/Director/Cameraman is Norwegian Amund Prestegard, 52,
experienced in all facets of filmmaking since 1972. Prestegard has run
his own production company, Tropos Dokumentar, since 1995. Peak Oil:
Imposed by Nature was nominated 'Best Professional Documentary' at the
Norwegian Documentary Film Festival 2005. The idea for this film came
about when Prestegard, during research for another project, became aware
of the global oil depletion situation when reading the works of
Campbell, Laherrere and Simmons during Autumn 2002. 

With a running time of approximately 30 minutes, this documentary
quickly absorbs, and delivers a much-needed wake-up call to anyone new
to the subject of peak oil. With the need for a worldwide understanding
of the causes, consequences and solutions, this documentary is a very
useful tool in raising awareness. Shorter than End of Suburbia but with
a strong UK focus, this is a documentary that everyone should see. 

For a quick link to order visit http://tinyurl.com/82flu 
======================================================================= 

ReviewSimmonsBook 
Twilight in the Desert: the coming Saudi oil shock and the world economy
by Matthew R Simmons 
Reviewed by John Gray 
http://www.newstatesman.com/Bookshop/300000101087 

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes. 

During the 1990s it was fashionable to scoff at the notion of limits to
growth. A knowledge-based economy was coming into being in which natural
resources didn't matter. The future would be driven by a search for new
ideas rather than the struggle for control of the planet's assets. We
were entering an era defined by information technology, in which rapid
economic growth could continue for ever. It was never easy to square
this fanciful philosophy with historical reality: the 1990s began with
the first Gulf war, which was fought solely to secure oil supplies, and
cheap oil was the basis of the prosperity of that feckless decade. Yet
somehow or other these facts were forgotten, until Iraq. 

With the launching of the second Gulf war, the crucial role of oil in
the world economy was exposed. From statements made by a number of its
American supporters, it seems clear that the strategic objective of the
Iraq war was to enable the United States to withdraw from Saudi Arabia,
which had come to be seen as an unreliable ally. According to the game
plan, Saddam Hussein would be toppled, Iraq would be pacified in a few
months and oil would fall to $10 a barrel. The global economy would then
take off in another boom with the US in firm control of the world's
second-largest oil reserves. 

This was always a far-fetched scenario, and things have not worked out
as envisaged. Iraq is a failed state in the grip of an intractable
insurgency, and the price of oil is roughly $60 a barrel. The scramble
to secure energy supplies is more frenzied than ever. The Great Game has
been resumed, not only in central Asia but also in the Gulf. If Iran is
attacked by the US in the course of the coming year or so, one reason
for this will be to stymie energy supply agreements that Tehran may be
planning with America's competitors, notably China and India. 

The limits to growth have not gone away. They have re-emerged as
classical geopolitics - a condition of continuous rivalry among the
great powers for control of the world's most valuable natural resources.
In this intensifying struggle, no country is more important than Saudi
Arabia. The kingdom is the world's pivotal oil producer. Any disruption
in supplies of its oil would be hugely destabilising to global markets.
Even more crucially, it is the most important resource base for the oil
that will be tapped to meet growing world demand. As emerging countries
industrialise, their energy use increases exponentially. Saudi Arabia is
the site of the planet's largest low-cost oil reserves, and in effect
acts as the energy bank of worldwide industrialisation. 

Matthew R Simmons is convinced that Saudi oil production is near its
peak, or indeed may have passed it, a development with awesome
implications. Simmons, a veteran oil finance insider who has been an
important adviser to the Bush administration, has done a huge amount of
research and bases his conclusions on carefully sifted evidence, not
large theories. Yet his view is consistent with the theory of M King
Hubbert, a Shell geophysicist who argued in 1956 that production rates
for oil and other fossil fuels exhibit a bell curve: when roughly half
the oil has been extracted, production declines. No one took much notice
of Hubbert at the time, but he predicted that oil production in the
continental United States would peak and start declining in the late
1960s or early 1970s - as it did. Since then a number of large oilfields
have also peaked, including the North Sea in 1999. When oil peaks it
does not run out - there is usually a slow decline that can be spun out
by new technologies - but the unavoidable result is falling production. 

Could we be near a global oil peak? Simmons believes that point may
already have passed and warns that the idea that technology can arrest
the decline may be a delusion. In his view, Saudi oil production has
been boosted by the use of technologies which actually reduce the future
supply of recoverable oil. The implication is that Saudi production has
peaked, and with it global oil production, at a time when demand is
rising inexorably. 

Twilight in the Desert is not always easy to read. It largely consists
of highly technical discussion of the history and condition of Saudi
oilfields. Yet its impact is to transform our view of the world. Many in
the oil industry - and particularly Aramco, the Saudi oil company - will
dispute Simmons's claim that Saudi production is near its peak
sustainable volume. For most readers the question will be whether
Simmons can be trusted. I am certain that he can. He is not the only oil
expert to say that a peak in global production may be near (Dr Colin
Campbell of the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre is another)
and, unlike many in the oil industry, Simmons has no axe to grind. This
is a ground-breaking book by an analyst of unimpeachable authority. 

Simmons's analysis suggests that the current phase of worldwide
industrialisation is crucially dependent on the uncertain reserves of a
single Gulf kingdom facing vast and potentially insuperable challenges.
As he shows in a superb digression, the most formidable of these is
population growth. The kingdom's current population of roughly 22
million is expected to rise to roughly 50 million by 2030, and unless
there is a large and sustained rise in the oil price, living standards
are bound to fall steeply - as they have been doing since the early
1980s. The Saudi rentier economy is facing a Malthusian crunch, and
against a background of already high unemployment the result so can only
be a condition of chronic instability. If the most obvious effect of our
dependency on oil is a series of resource wars, another could be an
upsurge of revolutionary movements in oil-producing countries. While it
would be an error to think that the Saudi regime is on the brink of
collapse, in a few decades the kingdom could well be an Islamist
republic - or, perhaps more likely given its origin as an artefact of
the colonial era, another failed state. 

Simmons makes a formidable case for the pivotal importance of Saudi
Arabia, but he may actually have understated the impact of peak oil. One
reason is the central role of oil in intensive farming. Contemporary
agriculture relies heavily on oil-based fertilisers, pesticides and
herbicides. At bottom, the green revolution was about the extraction of
food from petroleum, and a peak in world oil production could trigger a
peak in world food production. A second is climate change. As oil
supplies are becoming scarcer and less secure, many countries are
looking to other fossil fuels such as coal. New technologies can make
coal much cleaner, but a large increase in coal use alongside continuing
dependency on oil could magnify the greenhouse effect. In other words,
peak oil could accelerate global warming. 

The conjunction of peaking global oil production with quickening climate
change poses fundamental challenges that no section of opinion has
adequately confronted - including the Greens. The energy-intensive
lifestyle which is now spreading throughout the world cannot be
sustained with non-renewable and polluting fossil fuels, but it is sheer
fantasy to imagine that a human population of between six and eight
billion can be supported on a combination of windfarms, solar power and
organic agriculture. As Simmons notes, we may be approaching the limits
of growth that the Club of Rome identified more than 30 years ago, and
we are no better prepared to adjust to them now than we were then. 

John Gray's latest book is Heresies: Against Progress and Other
Illusions (Granta) 


On 22/07/2005, at 5:58 PM, Kate Colvin wrote: 


	Dear friend, 

	Please find attached the minutes of the transport meeting on
Thursday 21st July. .Next meeting of the Coalition will be on August 25
at 12.30pm. Next meeting of the disability transport sub-committee is
not yet scheduled. 

	In addition to the minutes I have been advised by the Office of
the Public Advocate that the investigation of the Governemnt's progress
in relation to the Coroners Inquiry recommendations about level
crossings is almost complete and a meeting will be held to consult on
their findings with interested parties. If you would like to participate
in that meeting (date not yet confirmed) please email Phil Grano at the
OPA on <phil.grano at justice.vic.gov.au>. 

	A separate email follows with a paper on peak oil by Alan
Parker. Please contact Alan direct if you need a copy in word format 


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