At the moment ASPO USA’s yearly conference is underway in Austin, Texas. The Dallas Morning News attended when the conference began and consequently published an article titled, ”Heresy in Texas! The era of big oil is almost over”.
“The conference goes through Saturday on the UT campus. There will be forums and presentations of scholarly papers. Among the speakers is Kjell Aleklett, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden and leading peak oil theorist. Aleklett acknowledges that U.S. output has increased recently, in part because of the shale oil and gas bubble, but he defends the group’s fundamental argument that drilling capacity will soon start going down. When that happens, he said prices will go up – and the cost of everything from gasoline to agricultural products will rise. He points to how crude oil reached a record $147 a barrel in July 2008. He says that could happen again, only this time it won’t just be a spike.”
Just nu pågår ASPO USA:s årliga konferens i Austin, Texas. Dallas Morning News var här och lyssnade då vi började och det blev en artikel med rubriken ”Heresy in Texas! The era of big oil is almost over”.
Aleklett's Energy Mix 
tahoevalleylinest
December 3, 2012
The dynamics affecting transport fuel over the rest of this decade, -forget about the 2035 crystal ball- are so complex as to stymie intellectually honest policymakers…
Simply looking at the sheer weight of armor lining up in and around the Arabian oil patch is a word to any thoughtful transport planner in any western country expecting a reliable flow from the Middle East. Professor Aleklett’s painstaking work in the face of Fatih Birol’s rude behavior and outright deception is more valuable than most energy analysts comprehend.
El Paso, Texas is doing something very interesting in the realm of transport; El Paso is considering using a small fleet of a dozen vintage trams (PCC railcars) as part of their mass transit system. What is notable about the El Paso plan is not just the electric emphasis here, but the fact they are looking at an older technology with an eye to reliability, simplicity and durability.
Railway enhancements in the United States are few and far between, and almost negligible in context of the some 400,000 miles of railway matrix America operated before WWII. It is exceedingly difficult to even find freight railway mode scopings in any of the state transport planning papers or 3000+ County Planning Bureau studies in the 21st Century.
The greatest failure of modern culture will be descent into the restrictions and economic malaise accompanying diehard insistence on maintaining rubber tire transport as end-all & be-all in the face of motor fuel limits coming at humanity. A great failure because it is so preventable, by simply adopting a steady and resolute rehab of dormant rail corridor and incremental expansion of rail/highway load points and equipment capacity.
The inability of governments to respond to the certitude of conventional Peak Oil puts the onus to act squarely on private corporations, institutions and families of means with wherewithal to move strategic corridor & dormant legacy railway line projects from imagination to engineering. Of course companies most reliant on trucking have the most obvious selfish interest in being prepared for transition into a railway based economy in a seamless manner…