Number of words: 702 Much has been made about the tension between fuel crops and food crops and that the growing of biofuels, especially ethanol, is leading to food price inflation. But there are good Biofuels and bad biofuels. In the United States, most ethanol is made from corn and, in 2007, US farmers grew … Read more

Number of words: 369 Canada is seen as the great saviour by oil enthusiasts. Canada has the world’s most extensive oil sands, estimated by some to be capable of producing 2.5 trillion barrels of oil! Sound too good to be true? It is. Oil (or tar) sands are a mix of asphalt (bitumen), earth, sand and … Read more

Number of words: 217 Decomposing organic matter over millions of years produced oil when underground heat of up to 150°C kick-started the process of changing it into hydrocarbons, which come in different degrees of complexity from the simple mixture of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms to make methane – CH – to the … Read more

Number of words: 210 Civilisations have fallen because of an inability to acquire sufficient quantities of energy, food and metals. Societies that have managed to control access to natural resources have survived and those that have failed have become extinct. The Spanish conquistadores’ pillage of Peru and Mexico, destroying both the Aztec and Inca cultures, … Read more

Number of words: 235 Whatever product or service you look at, its pricing is based on fossil fuels. Infrastructure and construction are reliant on metals mined all over the world, from Canada to Australia, but those metals not only need to be mined, they need to be processed and transported by ships and trucks to … Read more

Number of words: 367 In greed we trust . Classically trained economists love the idea that the answer to all our problems is to be found in the lure of profit , but unfortunately this idea ignores two fundamental equations in relation to oil .  Firstly, it is assumed that just because we have the … Read more

Number of words: 732 Today’s oil business started on the cusp of the American Civil War ( which pitted the industrialised North against the slave dependent South ) when , in August 1859 , Edwin L. Drake drilled down seventy – five feet on a farm in Pennsylvania and thus began Rockefeller later consolidated to a … Read more