On the Peak Oil (Demand) Front...

Peak Oil demand is spreading more pain and gloom throughout the Oil Patch of the global economy.

The following two articles were posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer on The Automatic Earth yesterday and today.

The first one:  More Pain Seen For US Crude As Product Glut Adds To Gloom (Reuters)

A glut of refined products has worsened the already-grim outlook for U.S. crude oil for the rest of the year and the first half of 2017, traders warned this week, as the spread between near-term and future delivery prices reached its widest in five months. A stubborn, massive supply overhang punished crude over the winter as U.S. oil futures hit 12-year lows in February. As supply outages and production cuts increased, crude rallied and spreads tightened significantly in May. But the unusually large amount of gasoline and oil in storage, combined with expectations of a ramp-up in crude production, has made traders more bearish on the price outlook for late 2016 and early 2017.

The second one: Fracklog in Biggest US Oil Field May All But Disappear (Bloomberg)

The number of dormant crude and natural gas wells in the U.S. stopped growing in the first quarter – and may all but disappear in the nation’s biggest oil field should prices hold steady. As of April 1, there were 4,230 wells left idle after being drilled, a figure little changed from January, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Intelligence. While some explorers have continued to grow their fracklog of drilled but not yet hydraulically fractured wells, others began tapping them in February as oil prices rose, the report showed.

Crude in the $40- to $50-a-barrel range may wipe out most of the fracklog in Texas’s Permian Basin and as much as 70% of the inventory in its Eagle Ford play by the end of 2017, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Andrew Cosgrove. While bringing them online is the cheapest way of taking advantage of higher prices, the wave of new supply also threatens to kill the fragile recovery that oil and gas markets have seen so far this year. “We think that by the end of the third quarter, beginning of the fourth quarter, the bullish catalyst of falling U.S. production will be all but gone,” Cosgrove said in an interview Thursday. “You’ll start to see U.S. production flat lining.”

"Higher oil prices," that is, in the $40 to $50 range, can entice the extractors to return to pump out or frack out the wells that are dormant, or just drilled and capped. Unfortunately, according to the above Reuters article, and oil price developments today, those higher prices cannot be guaranteed. As Raúl Meijer says, What’s going to happen to the lenders who made it all possible?

Now the latest from The Wall Street Journal:

Oil prices fell Friday as a glut in oil products stoked market concerns that the global crude market will remain oversupplied longer than expected. 

U.S. crude oil for September delivery recently fell 54 cents, or 1.2%, to $44.21 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent, the global benchmark, fell 58 cents, or 1.3%, to $45.62 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe.

This simple chart explains why oil prices are so low compared to those in 2014.
Source: vox.com.

Demand is not keeping up with supply, despite an amount lower than the peak extracted in July of 2015. A NEW oil production peak, projected for the end of 2016, is not expected to outstrip demand. Which means there will be an even BIGGER glut and a backup in oil supplies being delivered because consumption by the end user is not fast enough. And storing all that oil has got to cost a lot of money.

Now what's the cause of this new oil peak? It is certainly not demand. But the lenders have to be paid, the social welfare systems of the producer countries have to be supported, companies' employee payrolls have to be met (otherwise employees get laid off), and some amount has to be set aside or spent for maintenance, exploration, drilling of new wells, and overhead, especially if lenders become loath to lend any more money to the fossil fuels industry.

Eventually the oil producers and oil producing companies will have to wise up, and reduce the supply to clear out the glut and backup of oil, in order to get the prices to go back up to a level where they can make a profit, "hopefully" at a price the end consumer can afford*.

* "Hopefully" at a price the consumer can afford: this would be good for the economy, which always has to grow to keep people employed and governments to meet its obligations and lenders to be repaid, but it would be TERRIBLE for the biosphere, us and our civilization, all of which depend on a salubrious climate that doesn't change more rapidly than species and ecosystems can adapt. Burning of more fossil fuels means more Carbon Dioxide in the air which means more and faster Global Weirding... with the coming superstorms the size of continents and the strength of hurricanes coming sooner and more frequently. One already happened last winter.

Several Items Today, September 23, 2015.

Global Warming was evident in the 1940s -- not just the tropics, but the Arctic, too. Rachel Carson, in the 1962 edition of her The Sea around Us, noted signs of climactic warming in Greenland in the 1940s including the arrival of warmer-climate plants and birds.

You can probably pick up a copy of it, new or used, at your local mom-and-pop bookstore. If that fails, there’s always Amazon.com and friends.

From dtlange at Robertscribbler:

– GIZMODO 0922

“the fact that most big research universities are located in countries with seasons— what’s happening in the tropics has been largely ignored.

We Could Have Discovered Climate Change As Early As the 1940s if We Had Just Looked

“Remarkably our research shows that you could already see clear signs of global warming in the tropics by the 1960s but in parts of Australia, South East Asia and Africa it was visible as early as the 1940s,” said lead study author Andrew King in a statement. (That’s decades before the the fore-thinking researchers at Exxon discovered global warming!)

Climate change is hitting high latitude ecosystems the hardest — the Arctic, for instance, is warming twice as fast as the world at large. For that reason — and the fact that most big research universities are located in countries with seasons— what’s happening in the tropics has been largely ignored.

http://gizmodo.com/we-could-have-discovered-climate-change-as-early-as-the-1732420254

But it will take another ten to thirty years for the signal-to-noise ratio to confirm it; i.e., the signal of global warming exceeds the  noise of natural variability.

Thirty years!? It’ll be too late to act then. Even ten years is cutting it.

With all the mass media brainwashing going on, who will wake all the masses before then? Is it even possible????

From Abdel Adamski on Robertscribbler:

Also
http://phys.org/news/2015-09-reveal-global.html
Researchers reveal when global warming first appeared

While temperature records generally showed pronounced indications of global warming, heavy rainfall events have yet to make their mark. The models showed a general increase in extreme rainfall but the global warming signal was not strong enough yet to rise above the expected natural variation.

“We expect the first heavy precipitation events with a clear global warming signal will appear during winters in Russia, Canada and northern Europe over the next 10-30 years,” said co-author Dr Ed Hawkins from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, UK.

“This is likely to bring pronounced precipitation events on top of the already existing trend towards increasingly wet winters in these regions.”

This is going to deprive Russia of more and more Natural Gas, and the revenues from exporting it...

From humortra at Robertscribbler:

A new expedition to one of the mysterious Siberian giant holes found in recent years has concluded that it is a warning sign of a deadly threat to northern regions as the climate warms.

Scientists from the respected Trofimuk Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics insist the process by which a series of craters formed was caused by the melting of gas hydrates and the emission of methane.

This accumulates in a pingo – a mound of earth-covered ice – which then erupts causing the formation of the strange holes that have appeared on Russia’s Arctic fringe.

A pingo believed to be poised to explode ‘at any moment’ is now being constantly monitored by a Russian space satellite in an attempt to catch the moment when the eruption occurs.

http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/news/n0415-danger-of-methane-explosions-on-yamal-peninsula-scientists-warn/

Not so much apocalyptic as hearalding the coming global superstorms.

From Colorado Bob at Robertscribbler:

“It Felt Like the Apocalypse”: Israel Hit with Extreme and Unusual Weather on Jewish New Year
“It felt like the apocalypse, the rain has been torrential, there were about 10 lightning strikes in seconds, and even with your windshield wipers on high, it was impossible to see anything,” Mark Katz, a National Parks Authority employee, told the Times of Israel.

Since the beginning of September, Israel has experienced a series of extreme weather changes, beginning last week with a sudden sandstorm that blanketed the country in thick yellow dust.
The record setting five-day dust storm was also accompanied by a heat-wave, with new records reached across Israel in temperatures and air pollution.

Read more at http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/49091/it-felt-like-the-apocalypse-extreme-flash-flooding-hail-strike-israel-on-jewish-new-year-jerusalem/#3wE4Ml1A6jvMtMD8.99

Simple. Boil off all the water til there’s nothing left but salt. they [sic!]* you can market it as rock salt, or bury it.

*then

From Maria at Robertscribbler:

Solar Desalination in California. The company will be desalinating irrigation drainage in the Central Valley. The article doesn’t talk about where all that brine will go….What is an appropriate method way to deal with desal brine?

snip

“Less than one percent of the world’s desalination is powered by renewable energy sources today, but that could all change soon if companies like California-based WaterFX have anything to say about it. Its Aqua4 “concentrated solar still” (CSS) uses a concentrated solar thermal collector to compress heat, create steam and distill water at 30 times the efficiency of natural evaporation. It can produce 65,000 gallons of freshwater per day—and it can desalinate a wide range of water sources, not just seawater.

"Solar desalination is a technique used to remove salt from water via a specially designed still that uses solar energy to boil seawater and capture the resulting steam, which is in turn cooled and condensed into pristine freshwater. Salt and other impurities are left behind in the still.
Less than one percent of the world’s desalination is powered by renewable energy sources today, but that could all change soon if companies like California-based WaterFX have anything to say about it. Its Aqua4 “concentrated solar still” (CSS) uses a concentrated solar thermal collector to compress heat, create steam and distill water at 30 times the efficiency of natural evaporation. It can produce 65,000 gallons of freshwater per day—and it can desalinate a wide range of water sources, not just seawater.

"To wit, the company will start employing solar desalination to treat some 1.6 billion gallons of salt-laden irrigation drainage from California’s drought-stricken, agriculturally-rich Central Valley next year. Crops extract nearly pure water from soil, leaving behind salt and other potentially toxic minerals like selenium that naturally occur in the water. These excess minerals must be drained from the soil, or crop productivity plunges. By treating this drainage, WaterFX can prevent about percent of farmland in California from being retired every year to make room for storage for untreated drainage water."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-solar-desalination-slake-the-world-s-thirst/

Maria on Robertscribbler also responded to the second item above. My response to her remarks follows them:

I saw your comment up thread re: we don’t have decades. I recently learned that the big People’s Climate March was partially subsidized by FF. we know that Paris talks are being partially funded by big oil & major emitters. I’m afraid that unless the grass roots-/-county-to-county and state to state citizens & their leadership take bold action? Decades, I’m afraid. Hope I’m wrong. And that a massive positive feedback loop re: renewals ensues, giving FF & nat’l leadership no choice but to follow.

Crap. Combined with corporate dominance of our “free” news media (including Russia’s) means any such attempts to get Peak FF’s before their natural peaking at least 15 years from now (too many in my opinion) will be met with derision and … get ready now … “ZOMG DOOMER PORN!!!!!!” spoken from every news media mouthpiece.

And the same media will say the American Way of Life (Suburban Utopia and Happy Motoring! ^TM) is still non-negotiable.

And people will fall for it, especially here in the United States, for we are the World’s easiest marks. And that is the reason why our country will do the right thing after trying everything else.

And there’s something like 8,000 GT of Carbon embedded in the permafrost and the sea beds, which are melting or getting ready to melt as we speak. Sam Caranas, not to mention the paleolithic-paleoclimactic record, has demonstrated that rapid uncontrolled releases of Carbon, especially in the form of Methane, are likely to lead to a hot house extinction right quick. But the ice will stick around for a thousand more years or so, which will put a brake on uncontrolled global overheating.

Sum it all up, and we face Near Term Human Extinction, maybe even NTE, (by 3015).