If you're anything like me, your head has been scratched many times in the last year because of the price of crude oil. When I started at Stanford in 2001, both gas and oil prices (15US$/barrel) were low. Much too low to encourage rapid development of greener alternatives for transport or electricity production. My colleagues and I certainly expected (and hoped!) that the oil price would go up in the years following. Global demand was clearly increasing, with most of the demand rise caused by growing economies in China and India. But none of us had anticipated the very sharp increases between mid 2006 and mid 2008, with the extraordinary peak of $145US just this last summer.

Figure 1. Schematic of an Enhanced Geothermal System. Shown are the injector and producer wells, and man-made fractures in the rock at depth between the wells. The injected fluid is pushed from injector to producer all the while picking up heat from the rock.

Check out FirstLook for an attractive interactive display of wind and solar resource data at http://firstlook.3tiergroup.com/ .

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has just published its long awaited
World Energy Outlook 2008 .
A highly recommended read.

A quick first summary with more analysis to come:

The current financial crisis could well lead to a growing worldwide petroleum shortage in the short to medium term. The crisis has lead to a decrease in crude oil prices (see our stats in the left column of the page). Oil companies are therefore not making the profits hoped for and some have started cutting or delaying new projects.
IEA expects that oil prices will bounce back up to around 100 dollars per barrel in 2010.

Hawaii's Parker Ranch is one of the largest cattle ranches in the US, and one of the few that also ranches the sun and wind. Parker ranch uses solar and wind energy for their water pumping systems. We talked with Michael "Corky" Bryan, who has the fascinating title of "Vice President of Livestock". To him, this is just a fancy title for a cowboy. Corky shows us around the solar and wind ranch. If footage is a little shaky at times it is because we did a lot of the talking in his large white pickup truck, of course.

Is global oil production peaking? The peak oil debate has been going on for a number of years. Depending on how production and exploration numbers are presented, and also depending on who you talk to (NGO, oil industry, government, economist), you may either be convinced that oil will peak soon, or that we have plenty of it.

My colleague Roland Horne recently wrote an excellent summary of this problem, which he presented at the International Forum on Higher Education and Energy at China University of Petroleum last month. You can download it here. A very highly recommended read. It will help you put this debate in perspective.

October 15, 2008:

Scientific American Energy and Water

Check out this free version of the Scientific American Earth 3.0: Energy vs Water .
Very informative.

October 10, 2008:

The Washington Post last week had an interesting article about geothermal energy in the Philippines and beyond, featuring Stanford's Roland Horne. Roland can also be heard in an interview and a seminar on geothermal energy on this site.

October 10, 2008

Cannot resist chuckling a bit at today's newspaper reports about plunging oil prices. Oil price is falling below 80 dollars because of decreasing demand, so one paper write "demand predictions are *slashed* by 400,000 barrels a day for this year". Doing my maths, this means that "slashing" is equivalent to a reduction of less than 0.5%.
At the same time, the newspaper reports that OPEC is calling for supply reduction to keep the oil price from slipping more. If someone had said this last year when the oil price was, shriek yelp, above 50 dollars, it would have been considered ridiculous.