…..However, Justice William Gummow was skeptical: “It might be inherently adapted to mislead, might it not? … What is nature [sic] and healthy about the production or consumption of petroleum products?”

“it was a clever colour to have chosen so many years ago because it is now very much associated with the environmental movement.” A majority of the three judges rejected BP’s application and awarded costs against the company. Despite the setback, BP has registered the colour green in over 20 countries.
http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=366768391&url_num=3 0&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.prwatch.org%2Fnode%2F6163
jh

Designline’s natural gas/electric hybrid buses will be needed to allow bus services to expand without having to compete for shrinking supplies of deisel.

Hamilton Jet’s ferry propulsion units will be in demand in cities with harbours and waterways to relieve the pressure on railways, as they did in New York following 9/11.

Steelbro’s sidelifter container trailers will be needed to meet the rapid increase in demand for intermodal transfers of shipping containers between intercity rail and local trucking. Current intermodal systems are built around interstate rail of containers with intrastate movements still mainly handled by trucks with transfers happening at a small number of large hubs. Peak oil will trigger the rapid development of a large number of small hubs (ie, what we have always had in this country) and traditional container handling equipement is either too big or takes too long to manufacture.

I don’t know exactly what either of them said - could you reference what they said, rather than make a quote up? Anything else is not good debating.

I had a look through the Greens Peak Oil PRs from 2005,
http://www.greens.org.nz/docs/more_docs.asp?class=PR&cat=133#2005
but I can’t find any where Jeanette prophisises about future prices. And I’m sure that’s because she is careful to be scientific and balanced at all times.

If she ever did state actual figures I bet she said “some experts have predicted”.

Since refinery capacity ( Gee, semantics problems too, I should have simply said capacity ) is growing far more slowly than demand and productivity of individual refineries does not keep up, the availability and price of the refined products we actually use is far more dependent on what happens at the refineries than on how far over the peak the oil supply has gotten. I was pointing out the distinct possibility that the refinery capacity is restrained by people who are actual insiders. The folks who run XOM and BP, the Saudis and their good buddy Darth Cheney. They want to keep the profits coming. They know that the patch is going dry. Extra refining capacity might make it far easier to see that more oil can’t be pumped… and would definitely make the profits smaller. You have to think about the larger picture.

Whatever you wish to think about productivity, it isn’t the answer to the shortage of refining capacity. They’re all running flat out 24×7 just as tightly run as any process plant that size can be run. 96% of the capacity is used.

Ignored growth? Me? What in the world gives you that idea? I think about refinery capacity relative to the demand and the margin is shrinking pretty nicely as demand ramps up. Maybe in 5 years or so the capacity will show up in those plants in Indonesia and the mid-east. Right now both are within spitting distance of 80 MBPD and refinery utilization is an unsustainable 96%…. at that rate any plant that goes down means somebody does not get served.

If more capacity comes on line, it may well become impossible to fill some of the input pipes to somebody’s refineries. I suggest that the restraints in the old-money industry are, as Senator Wyden showed in his report back in 2001, engineered at the corporate level to maintain profit margins. There is ample reason to believe this is true. I speculate only to the extent that the industry may be further guided by political operators not wishing to let people see the cliff they are driving over and others of different politics who want to divert supplies away from the West.

I happen to think those motives exist (profit and politics), exist. I may not agree with them, but too much sh!t happens that fits the theory.

respectfully
BJ

If the ‘peak’ of conventional light crude wasn’t for another 40 years, what would we do with the intervening years? Other than expand our economy, our infrastructure, and our current ways and means of living…meaning that when demand does finally do-in supply, are we better or worse off for having had the extra time to prepare?

Another article worth linking to from energy bulletin
http://www.energybulletin.net/31076.html

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the number of refineries has nothing to do with limits on oil production, just as the reduction in western toy factories has nothing to do with reaching peak elves.

It is much more to do with more mundane things like the costs associated with regulations, investment cost and limited demand growth in developed countries, which is where there has been a numeric decline - you ignore the growth in refineries in developing countries. The USA is not the world.

Refinery numbers are irrelevant when capacity increases - it’s called productivity and a process not unique to refining. WHy buid a new refinery to cope with single digit growth in demand when you can do so by tweaking the existing one.

NZRC is a classic example of that happening on our doorstep. Over the last 40 years it has been upgraded in quality and capacity as it makes more sense than building another one in Timaru.

And where it made sense to build a 100kbd plant in the 60s now you would only look at >250kbd as scale is important. That scale puts out of business the small and inefficient.

Turn your theory around, why would NZRC be spending 250 million on an investment with an extremely limited future?

What are we gonna do when the “Japanese Housewives” are no longer willing to prop up our paper economy or willing to subsidise our consumption driven lifestyles? How are we gonna pay for our power, petrol, or even our groceries when we lose our jobs and our house values collapse? Did anyone read the link I posted awhile back? http://energybulletin.net/23259.html

New Zealand’s No. 8 wire/Kiwi Ingenuity identity is as much of a myth as our “clean green” image.

Peak-Oil is here. The price of oil is gamed by the US government and the Saudis with the effect that it’s been raised early to a plateau that they can defend for a while longer. The oil patches themselves are depleted and if you look at the details you’ll see field after field in declining production. This is ONE of the reasons there are so few new refineries. No point. We can refine pretty much everything that we can produce now, so this stricture on demand for the raw product produces extra profits for the refiners and extra price signal early in the cyle to the consumers.

There’s another part to that signal too and it has to do with the US $ which is balanced in astonishing ways as it teeters along the cliff-face. Sheer inflation to the left and deep depression to the right. This is also gamed to the hilt. What comes next?

respectfully
BJ

I see peak oil as a big winch slowly gripping everything and winding it in.

Maybe the BIG peak will have a wide summit as there is a lot of discretion (perhaps) as in use the car less.
jh

Didn’t Colin Campbell say oil had peaked in 1989, 1995, 2000, and variously will in 2010, 2007, 2005 and 2010 again?