Monday 18 January 2010

Jeff Rubin on Next 10 Years of Oil

"Prediction is difficult. Especially about the future."
- Niels Bohr

With that quote, here's a prediction from Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at Canadian CIBC World Markets, who did his own study and understood peak oil. He also wrote a book, 'Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization' which is recommended for business types, who get bored by too much numbers or complex scientific analysis.

Sunday 17 January 2010

Toyota - New Concepts & Peak Oil Admittance

@ the tradeshow of a dying industry, Detroit Auto Show, Toyota USA launched new car concepts, including this:

Toyota FT-CH concept car

It's small (shorter than Yaris), efficient (more than Prius), meant for the young growing population and cheaper (emerging Asia, here we come).

At the same time, they gave this press release:

"Within the next 10 to 20 years, we will not only reach peak oil we will enter a period where demand for all liquid fuels will exceed supply."
- Jim Lents, Toyota Motor Sales (USA)

Well, well, what do you know.

Who would you you trust to tell you about Peak oil?

An oil company who's incentive is to lie about it as long as possible, so you won't start transferring to alternatives.

Or a car company, who knows that the first to reach alternative power sources, will reap potentially big benefits.

They are both biased, so take your pick.

However, Toyota didn't tell where all the energy for their battery electric and fuel cell hybrids would come from.

We can venture a guess with a high likelihood of being correct : C O A L.

Get ready for it, because that's what we are going to get. All other sources (wind, solar, natural gas, hydrates, unconventionals) are just too expensive, too slow to build, don't scale, in scarce supply or are geographically not as distributed.