"In my view, there is little or no chance of military action against Iran, and having been to Iran five times in recent years, and as recently as two months ago, there is much I could write on this subject... In the short term the Iran 'crisis' is in my view being hyped for all it is worth to entice yet more unwary speculators into the oil market... My forecast is that the crude oil price will fall dramatically during the first half of 2012, possibly as low as $45 to $55 per barrel."

-- Chris Cook, former official of the International Petroleum Exchange

UPDATE: The Iranians have made a surprise tactical move in reaction to the recently announced E.U. embargo:

"The Iranian government [will] present a bill to parliament this weekend calling for an immediate halt to oil deliveries to Europe. The move...has come about in response to the EU agreement to impose sanctions against Iran, which were announced earlier this week... The EU sanctions 'allow' for oil deliveries from Iran until July 1. Any pre-empting of this timescale by Tehran could prove problematic for countries like Italy, Greece and Spain, who would need to urgently find new suppliers. Greece is the most exposed, receiving a third of all its oil imports from Iran..."

-- Der Spiegel

"Exxon Mobil Corp has moved to freeze up to $12 billion in Venezuelan assets around the world as the U.S. company fights for payment in return for the state's takeover of a huge oil project last year... Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took over Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips stakes in multibillion-dollar heavy oil projects in Venezuela's oil region last June. The move was part of the left-wing leader's drive to nationalize key industries including utilities and telecommunications companies owned by private companies." -- Reuters

See our previous commentary on Chavez. It will be interesting to see if the "Vohzd of Venezuela" can take on the Rockefeller oil monopoly and win, or whether this is just another bit of Masonic theatre to justify jacking up the oil price.

"Within five years, solar power will be cheap enough to compete with carbon-generated electricity... In a decade, the cost may have fallen so dramatically that solar cells could undercut oil, gas, coal and nuclear power by up to half. The secret? ...a dark polymer foil, as thin a sheet of paper. It is 200 times lighter than the normal glass-based solar materials, which require expensive substrates and roof support... Rather than being manufactured laboriously piece by piece, it can be mass-produced in cheap rolls like packaging..."

See: London Telegraph article (2007-02)

Peak oil advocate Mike Ruppert has bailed out and headed for the Venezuelan jungle:

"As the human race enters the first stages of inevitable collapse resulting from Peak Oil, I left the United States with one large suitcase, my laptop, and a backpack... My country is dead. Its people have surrendered to tyranny... I would cry tears of joy today to see just one campus overrun by a modern equivalent of the [Marxist] Students for a Democratic Society... Because Venezuela has become the singular world leader in resisting US domination under the courageous, intelligent, and inspired leadership of Hugo Chavez, I want to begin the rest of my days here." -- Mike Ruppert

Venezuela is a charter member of OPEC. The oil cartel promotes the "peak oil" myth to justify the inflated price. Bush and Chavez, like other tools of the cartel, are a Punch and Judy show to distract the rubes.

Adios, comrade Ruppert! Please take your whiny collectivist propaganda with you.

"There are over 16,000 square miles of oil shale in the Green River (Wyoming) formation... Each acre holds 2 million barrels of oil -- it's the most concentrated energy source on earth, according to the U.S. Energy Department... You see, the government always knew this land was saturated with oil -- but getting it out has always been expensive... Of the 2 trillion barrels of proven oil in the Green River Formation -- between 800 billion and 1.2 trillion barrels are recoverable."

That's enough to cover ALL U.S. consumption, at the current rate of about 20 million barrels per day, for over 100 years!

See: Matt Badiali article (2006-05)

"Instantaneous nuclear elimination of population centres might even be considered merciful, compared to starvation and massacres prolonged over decades. Eventually, probably before 2150, world population will have fallen to a level that renewable energy, mainly biomass, can sustain... In the Darwinian world that preceded and will follow the fossil fuel era, these concepts [of human rights] were and will be meaningless. Survival in a Darwinian resource-poor world depends on the ruthless elimination of rivals..."

But first they have to herd the rest of the "useless eaters" into the target mega-cities. Also see "The Earth Charter and the Ark of Hope".

See: Colin Campbell article (ASPO newsletter #588, 2005-07)

"New research coauthored by Dudley Herschbach, Baird research professor of science [at Harvard] and recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize in chemistry... describes how investigators combined three abiotic (non-living) materials -- water (H2O), limestone (CaCO3), and iron oxide (FeO) -- and crushed the mixture together with the same intense pressure found deep below the earth's surface. This process created methane (CH4), the major component of natural gas."

See: Harvard Magazine article (2005-03)

"TCP technology taps into one of the world's richest sources of energy: waste by-products. In the U.S. alone, agricultural waste has the potential to produce over 4 billion barrels of oil per year, and that's just the beginning!" ConAgra Foods, Inc., one of North America's largest packaged food companies, has entered into a joint venture with CWT to commercialize technology that converts organic waste materials into valuable natural resources like oils, gases and carbon... "This is our first-out plant, and we estimate we'll make oil at $15 a barrel. In three to five years, we'll drop that to $10, the same as a medium-size oil exploration and production company. And it will get cheaper from there."

Note that the process can also safely handle ANY mixed municipal waste including plastics, paper, chemicals, and sewage sludge.

(Here's a recent update showing that the plant did not live up to these rosy projections)

See: Changing World Technology

"Henry Ford's first Model-T was built to run on hemp [fuel] and the CAR ITSELF WAS CONSTRUCTED FROM HEMP! On his large estate, Ford was photographed among his hemp fields. The car, 'grown from the soil,' had hemp plastic panels whose impact strength was 10 times stronger than steel"

See: Alternative fuel story (2005-08)

"We present in situ observations of hydrocarbon formation via carbonate reduction at upper mantle pressures and temperatures. Methane was formed from FeO, CaCO3-calcite, and water at pressures between 5 and 11 GPa and temperatures ranging from 500°C to 1,500°C."

Paper: Generation of methane in the Earth's mantle

See: National Academy of Sciences (2004-09)