Last Update: July 25, 2015

  1. Fossil Fuel’s gift to the world – modern society, powerful machines, 7+ billion people
  2. How many days of human labor is in a gallon of gasoline?
  3. What’s in Crude Oil? A lotta toxic stuff, Benzene, Tuolene, etc
  4. Health effects of fossil fuel consumption
    1. Health effects of burning Diesel, and the exhaust fumes
    2. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, asthma, from living near diesel exhaust concentrations
  5. Peak Oil, Peak Natural Gas, Peak Resources, Peak Everything
    1. What happens when the power runs out? That is, when Peak Oil really bites us in the butt?
    2. Fracking's false oil-energy boom leading the world to financial collapse?
    3. Peak Oil 101 – Chris Martenson
    4. Peak Oil Reading List
    5. DON’T WORRY, DRIVE ON: Fossil Fools & Fracking Lies
    6. 300 Years of FOSSIL FUELS in 300 Seconds
    7. U.S. Military rethinking its energy policies; speech by Adm. Mullin at the Energy Security Forum of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
    8. Fueling the Future Force: Preparing the Department of Defense for a post-Petroleum era
  6. The oil companies keep winning as long as we keep giving them money
  7. Natural Gas – the Supposedly Clean Fossil Fuel
  8. Gasoline and Diesel
    1. What is the true price of gasoline? Should it cost $10 per gallon?
    2. Types of Crude Oil sources & constraints
    3. Extracting Crude Oil from the ground
    4. Transporting crude oil to refineries
    5. Refining crude oil to oil products
    6. Delivery to consumers
    7. Oil Products Consumption – burning gasoline, etc
    8. Crude Oil Dispersants – The main tool to mitigate crude oil spill disasters
  9. Coal
    1. Types of Coal
    2. Clean coal? Misnomer?
    3. Coal as a source of electricity or conversion into synthetic crude oil
    4. History of Coal Use
  10. Fracking – Hydraulic Fracturing – Acidizing
    1. Produced Water from Fracking operations
    2. Fracking (waste water injection) probably causes induced earthquakes
    3. Hydraulic Fracturing (fracturare hidraulica) in Romania’s shale gas (gaze de sist) formations
      1. Public perception of shale gas in Romania
      2. The future of shale gas in Romania: questions and policy options
      3. Romania after Nabucco: Energy Security Options
      4. Romania’s Oil and Gas Framework: 2013 highlights
      5. Paleozoic Paleozoic Shale Gas Plays of the Eastern Europe: Romania case study
    4. United States State Department Bureau of Energy Resources – USAID
      1. Fiscal Year 2014 USAID Budget Request contains funding for fracking program
    5. Marathon Oil explains that Hydraulic Fracturing is safe and beneficial
    6. WARNING Fracking An Inconvenient Truth
    7. Truth about Fracking – Wes Wilson – Phil Doe
    8. Costs of Fracking for Oil and Gas

Overwhelmingly the transportation system runs on fossil oil that’s refined into gasoline, diesel or kerosene. The fossil oil resources of this planet have enabled our society to invent a wonderful new lifestyle. Rapid world-wide travel has shrunk the effective distance between nations. It has given us an unrivaled opportunity to see how other cultures live and operate. It has reduced menial labor and enabled the building of huge cities.

But… The observation over and over is that oil fields reach a point where production can no longer be increased. Once a field reaches its peak production point, it enters a declining of production. Sum up the production curves of all fields around the planet and it indicates a point in time where the global oil production will peak. That point of time is expected to arrive soon, if it has not already occurred.

There is a simplistic observation from economics we can make. The demand for oil has increased continuously since it was first commercialized. That is, except for a few years in 1978-1982, due to the effects of the Arab Oil Embargo those years. It’s fair to assume the demand for oil will continue to increase, caveat various external influences. But if oil production cannot keep up with demand, economics dictates that the price will go up (the law of supply and demand).

Remember the oil price increases that lead to the oil price bubble in 2008? That’s only just the beginning.

It’s not just the peak of oil production, but the peak of producing almost everything. Our society has followed the same pattern with every raw material. It mines the raw material, makes it into a product, which we use, and then throw away. There is little attempt or thought to reuse anything.

This pattern is wholly unlike nature. The biological life systems on this planet practice recycling and have hundreds of millions of years of existence to prove the value of recycling.

About the Author(s)

David Herron : David Herron is a writer and software engineer focusing on the wise use of technology. He is especially interested in clean energy technologies like solar power, wind power, and electric cars. David worked for nearly 30 years in Silicon Valley on software ranging from electronic mail systems, to video streaming, to the Java programming language, and has published several books on Node.js programming and electric vehicles.
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