The second Peak Oil webring

The original Peak Oil webring was started by a guy calling himself FatherOf4, to put together a list of energy-related blogs. Perhaps he saw my attempt to put up my own little list. Or perhaps it was just a good idea at the time since, incredibly, there wasn't any prior effort at this other than a few blogrolls here and there. It became quite popular and noted peak oil sites like peakoil.com and energybulletin.net joined up as well, even though strictly speaking, they weren't exactly blogs.

FatherOf4 himself kept a blog called Flying Talking Donkey. He would post links to peak oil news and articles. Now there was one lean, mean posting machine. Whereas over here at lowem.log, I would attempt to do some sort of news clipping and editing and putting it into context and so on, he would be doing no such thing. He was putting up link after link after link. News aggregation, extremis - fast and furious. As oil went up to the $50's and $60's and $70's, the FTD blog was actually keeping up with the news avalanche - the guy was incredible.

However for some reason or another, in the past week or so, it all came to a stop. The last thing I saw was FatherOf4 putting up a list of all the sites on the Peak Oil webring and saying he screwed up his ID or something like that. I put up a query on the forums - looked like nobody knew what happened as well.

Okay, so I went over to ~~his~~ another blogger, Big Gav's profile and discovered that someone else had also set up a second Peak Oil webring, so I signed up. Whoever's running it is certainly efficient - the activation came within 10 minutes.

And finally, Flying Talking Donkey seems to have been taken over by spammers. Go take a look if you like - flyingtalkingdonkey [dot] blogspot [dot] com. I'm not going to link to it, the curious will have to enter the address in manually. In fact, I have taken it down from my bookmark section and my previous blog entry and would advise all other Peak Oil sites and bloggers to do the same.

Therefore - the Peak Oil webring is dead; long live the Peak Oil webring! :)

(2005-10-07 14:55:47 SGT) [Energy] Permalink Comments [5]

Troubled future for world oil supply

peakoil.com -> nwsource.com :

It may already be too late for the United States to avoid massive economic disruption because of a decline in worldwide oil production, an industry expert said yesterday. Roger Bezdek, a consultant for the U.S. Department of Energy, told the Global Oil Depletion conference that it will take more than a decade to find alternative sources of energy if oil production reaches a peak, which may be imminent. "No one knows when oil will peak," Bezdek said. "But if we wait until the peak, we will be in deep economic troubles for decades."

Matthew Simmons, an investment banker, said the United States has been in denial about energy issues for decades. The nation has built its economy and lifestyle around an endless supply of cheap oil and now finds itself with stiff competition for oil from India and China. Simmons said the U.S. should switch to moving more goods by railroad and ship, rather than trucks, to cut oil consumption. More workers should work from home to cut down on commuting, he said. The nation should also grow more of its own food to cut down on imports.

Herman Franssen, president of International Energy Associates of Chevy Chase, Md., said that two-thirds of the world's oil comes from the Middle East, which probably cannot increase its production very much. He predicted that India and China within 20 years will need as much oil as the industrialized world now consumes and that prices will skyrocket.

GM sells assets to Toyota

peakoil.com -> bloomberg.com :

General Motors Corp. agreed to sell its holdings in Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. to Toyota for about $740 million, or less than half their value on GM's books, as it struggles with rising losses. The Fuji stake had been valued at $1.5 billion, the automaker said. "It's surprising how fast GM is selling off the family silver," said Graeme Maxton, a director of the Economist Intelligence Unit in Hong Kong. "It rings alarm bells."

A stake in Fuji Heavy will give Toyota access to the company's technology for batteries which can be used in hybrid gasoline-electric cars. Hybrids such as Toyota's Prius and Honda's Civic are equipped with nickel hydride batteries made by Panasonic EV Energy Co. Fuji Heavy's Chief Executive Officer Kyoji Takenaka has said his company's manganese lithium-ion batteries last longer than Panasonic's nickel hydride batteries and handle temperature extremes better.

- Will the next-generation Prius be running on lithium-ion batteries? Now that would be interesting. As we all know, mobile phones have long ago switched from Ni-Mh to Li-Ion, perhaps hybrids will also be undergoing a similar transition in the future. The factors holding this back have been issues like cost and recharge cycles.