"China oil demand in fastest growth in over 3 yrs
By Jim Bai and Chen Aizhu
BEIJING, Oct 26 (Reuters) - China's apparent oil demand rose 12.5 percent in September from a year earlier, the sixth rise in a row and the fastest rate since June 2006, as refiners operated at record rates amid a sustained recovery in economic activity.
However, the robust September rate, anticipated by some analysts, may have been inflated by a low base a year earlier when implied oil demand inched 2.3 percent as the global financial crisis began infiltrating into the world's second largest oil market.
China used nearly 8.17 million barrels per day of oil last month, Reuters calculations based on official data showed on Monday, 460,000 bpd or 5.8 percent higher than August.
The demand growth, the first double-digit rally since August 2006, came as China's fuel stocks -- excluded from the calculations -- edged lower for the second month in a row, providing more solid fundamental support to global oil prices CLc1 now near one-year high just under $80 a barrel.
"While we do not deny that other factors such as currency movements are influencing oil price, there are also important factors from the physical market that drove oil prices," Paul Ting, an independent oil analyst, said in a recent note.
"It was not a coincidence that China's demand strength in the past two months corresponded with oil price strength, nor was it a coincidence that oil prices were weak in the first quarter when China's oil demand was weak."
Demand for diesel, the main transportation fuel in China, grew 7.7 percent from a year earlier, the first increase since June and the fastest since Nov 2008, offering fresh evidence that industry activities were picking up.
Chinese refineries processed a record 7.99 million bpd last month, 14 percent higher than a year earlier, as growth in the world's third largest economy quickened to 8.9 percent in the third quarter from 7.9 percent in the second quarter."
O uso de petróleo por parte da China está a crescer a um ritmo acelerado. Este gigante já consome mais de 8 milhões de barris de petróleo por dia (Portugal consome à volta de 300000 e os EUA cerca de 20 milhões). Provavelmente, antes de a China atingir o nível de consumo dos EUA, o petróleo extraído não chegará para suprir as necessidades mundiais. Por isso, o cenário futuro é a inevitável subida de preços dos combustíveis o que se traduzirá na subida generalizada dos preços dos bens de consumo, com destaque para os bens alimentares. Logo, a inflação aumentará e atrás disto virá o aumento dos juros dos empréstimos. Isto não vai ser fácil!
sexta-feira, 30 de outubro de 2009
terça-feira, 27 de outubro de 2009
Um final de Outubro muito, muito quente
Não sei qual o significado destes dias muito quentes de final de Outubro. Mas, segundo informações meteorológicas disponíveis, parece que este tempo quente está a afectar de um modo geral toda a Europa ao ponto de Moscovo ainda registar temperaturas mínimas acima de zero.
segunda-feira, 26 de outubro de 2009
Outros minerais
Vários silicatos: granada, anfíbola, turmalina, piroxena e um opaco não identificado
Formas euédricas
A perfeição de um mineral da dimensão de um grão de areia:
Piroxena monoclínica (augite)
Piroxena monoclínica (augite)
sábado, 24 de outubro de 2009
Time is running out
Oil prices hit high but report warns of supply crunch
• US light crude oil futures pushes above $79 a barrel
• Report blames government for ignoring supply problem
by:
Ashley Seager
guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 October 2009
Ashley Seager guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 October 2009 23.00 BST Article history
Oil prices have pushed above $79 a barrel, but a new report claims the world is facing a supply crisis. Photograph: Hasan Jamali/AP
World oil prices hit their highest point for a year yesterday, as a major new report urged governments around the world to take drastic action to head off an approaching oil supply crunch.
US light crude futures pushed above $79 a barrel, supported by the view that a recovering world economy would raise demand for crude. Oil prices have more than doubled from the low point they hit in the spring, but are still around half the all-time high of nearly $150 a barrel they reached in early summer last year.
Analysts have been surprised at the recent resilience of oil prices given the impact on energy demand of the global recession. In spite of this year's volatility in the oil price, the underlying trend for a decade has been for it to rise steadily.
A report from the non-governmental organisation Global Witness – famous for its exposé of so-called "blood diamonds" – pointed to an impending supply shock that could be so severe that many of the world's poor countries would simply be shut off from the world of energy by sky-high prices.
Two years in the preparation, Global Witness's report, Heads in the Sand, accused governments of ignoring the fact that the world could soon start to run short of oil. This would lead to huge consequences in terms of price shocks and much higher levels of violence around the world than last year's food riots.
"There is a train crash about to happen from an energy point of view. But politicians everywhere seem to have entirely missed the scale of the problem," said the report's author, Simon Taylor.
"We are all addicted to oil but if you look at the mathematics of the problem, they simply don't add up in terms of future supply and demand."
The report went through the latest figures from the oil industry and the Paris-based International Energy Agency, which last year drastically reduced its estimate of the available oil.
The IEA figures showed there could be a gap of 7m barrels a day between supply and demand by 2015. That represents about 8% of the expected world demand by then of 91m barrels a day.
The IEA expects production from existing oilfields to fall by 50% between now and 2020 and warned the world needs to find an additional 64m barrels a day of capacity by 2030 – equivalent to six times current Saudi Arabian production.
But Global Witness took issue with the IEA's recommendation that the oil industry spend $450bn a year chasing these supplies, many of which may well not be there. Because of the demands of climate change, the report argued, the money would be better invested in moving rapidly to a post-oil world of renewable energy and conservation.
Taylor said even the new IEA projections of how much new oil the world would discover were likely to be over-optimistic. He said the so-called "big" oil discoveries of the last few years added up to nothing like the "discovery rate" needed to replace the world's dwindling supplies from existing fields. They have totalled around 16bn barrels, or only around 1.7m barrels a day, once up and running.
The report said that between 2005 and 2008, global oil production ceased to grow in spite of widespread investment and rising prices, which should normally have brought forth a big rise in supply. It notes that the biggest year for new discoveries was 1965, since when they have been falling. Global oil production overtook new discoveries in 1984 and has outpaced them ever since.
It also dismissed as myth a widely held expectation that tar sands in Canada could fill the supply gap. Tar sands are unlikely ever to yield more than 3-4m barrels a day, equivalent to the pace at which existing fields are declining every year.
Taylor said the four key issues about oil – declining output, declining discoveries, increasing demand and insufficient projects in the pipeline – have been apparent for many years.
"But governments and multilateral agencies have failed to recognise the imminence and scale of the global oil supply crunch, and most of them remain completely unprepared for its consequences," he said.
"There has been a decade of dithering and it is now too late to avoid the consequences unless the authorities move like there is no tomorrow."
Dr Jeremy Leggett, author of books on peak oil and convenor of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security, said: "A steep premature descent in global oil production would be worse than the credit crunch in terms of economic impact. Unlike the credit crunch, however, the peak oil risk assessment involves big companies sounding the alarm alongside organisations like Global Witness."
• US light crude oil futures pushes above $79 a barrel
• Report blames government for ignoring supply problem
by:
Ashley Seager
guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 October 2009
Ashley Seager guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 October 2009 23.00 BST Article history
Oil prices have pushed above $79 a barrel, but a new report claims the world is facing a supply crisis. Photograph: Hasan Jamali/AP
World oil prices hit their highest point for a year yesterday, as a major new report urged governments around the world to take drastic action to head off an approaching oil supply crunch.
US light crude futures pushed above $79 a barrel, supported by the view that a recovering world economy would raise demand for crude. Oil prices have more than doubled from the low point they hit in the spring, but are still around half the all-time high of nearly $150 a barrel they reached in early summer last year.
Analysts have been surprised at the recent resilience of oil prices given the impact on energy demand of the global recession. In spite of this year's volatility in the oil price, the underlying trend for a decade has been for it to rise steadily.
A report from the non-governmental organisation Global Witness – famous for its exposé of so-called "blood diamonds" – pointed to an impending supply shock that could be so severe that many of the world's poor countries would simply be shut off from the world of energy by sky-high prices.
Two years in the preparation, Global Witness's report, Heads in the Sand, accused governments of ignoring the fact that the world could soon start to run short of oil. This would lead to huge consequences in terms of price shocks and much higher levels of violence around the world than last year's food riots.
"There is a train crash about to happen from an energy point of view. But politicians everywhere seem to have entirely missed the scale of the problem," said the report's author, Simon Taylor.
"We are all addicted to oil but if you look at the mathematics of the problem, they simply don't add up in terms of future supply and demand."
The report went through the latest figures from the oil industry and the Paris-based International Energy Agency, which last year drastically reduced its estimate of the available oil.
The IEA figures showed there could be a gap of 7m barrels a day between supply and demand by 2015. That represents about 8% of the expected world demand by then of 91m barrels a day.
The IEA expects production from existing oilfields to fall by 50% between now and 2020 and warned the world needs to find an additional 64m barrels a day of capacity by 2030 – equivalent to six times current Saudi Arabian production.
But Global Witness took issue with the IEA's recommendation that the oil industry spend $450bn a year chasing these supplies, many of which may well not be there. Because of the demands of climate change, the report argued, the money would be better invested in moving rapidly to a post-oil world of renewable energy and conservation.
Taylor said even the new IEA projections of how much new oil the world would discover were likely to be over-optimistic. He said the so-called "big" oil discoveries of the last few years added up to nothing like the "discovery rate" needed to replace the world's dwindling supplies from existing fields. They have totalled around 16bn barrels, or only around 1.7m barrels a day, once up and running.
The report said that between 2005 and 2008, global oil production ceased to grow in spite of widespread investment and rising prices, which should normally have brought forth a big rise in supply. It notes that the biggest year for new discoveries was 1965, since when they have been falling. Global oil production overtook new discoveries in 1984 and has outpaced them ever since.
It also dismissed as myth a widely held expectation that tar sands in Canada could fill the supply gap. Tar sands are unlikely ever to yield more than 3-4m barrels a day, equivalent to the pace at which existing fields are declining every year.
Taylor said the four key issues about oil – declining output, declining discoveries, increasing demand and insufficient projects in the pipeline – have been apparent for many years.
"But governments and multilateral agencies have failed to recognise the imminence and scale of the global oil supply crunch, and most of them remain completely unprepared for its consequences," he said.
"There has been a decade of dithering and it is now too late to avoid the consequences unless the authorities move like there is no tomorrow."
Dr Jeremy Leggett, author of books on peak oil and convenor of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security, said: "A steep premature descent in global oil production would be worse than the credit crunch in terms of economic impact. Unlike the credit crunch, however, the peak oil risk assessment involves big companies sounding the alarm alongside organisations like Global Witness."
quarta-feira, 21 de outubro de 2009
Começou o Outono-Inverno
A frente polar atingiu finalmente a latitude da Península Ibérica. A imagem acima mostra a situação às 9 horas de ontem na altura em que uma frente fria atravessava a parte central da Península. A faixa colorida com orientação SW-NE representa a zona de maior precipitação associada a este sistema frontal.
terça-feira, 13 de outubro de 2009
Outubro quente
Lisboa, 12 de Outubro de 2009. Rua do Arco a S. Mamede.
Mais um início de Outono muito quente cuja causa não estará, certamente, relacionada com o rescaldo das eleições autárquicas. Depois de um fim-de-semana um pouco atribulado devido a problemas no meu condomínio sabe bem poder usufruir desta bonita luz de Verão (será um S. Martinho precoce?).
Confiando na minha memória meteorológica tenho a sensação de ter sentido já vários inícios de Outono quentes e secos. Aliás, o mais preocupante parece ser mesmo a escassez de chuva. No quadro ibérico a situação é realmente preocupante na metade sul da península e no levante onde a falta de água é muito frequente, a ponto de já se praticar o transporte das águas dos rios setentrionais para o sul ressequido.
Temo que a explosão dos empreendimentos turísticos do sul do nosso país venha aumentar o nosso deficit neste líquido tão precioso. A construção de campos de golfe um pouco por todo lado vai exigir cada vez mais água. Água que não existe mesmo sem campos de golfe.
Nos tempos que correm as alterações do clima conduziram à indução, no nosso país, de um padrão de pluviosidade irregular onde são frequentes as chamadas trombas de água. Este regime curto e intensivo de precipitação provoca muitos estragos no solo, acentuado a sua erosão.
Por enquanto vamos poder desfrutar deste bom tempo por mais uns dias. É bom que as chuvas de oeste não se atrasem no calendário para não ficarmos ressequidos antes do próximo Verão.
sexta-feira, 2 de outubro de 2009
Outono 2009
Ele aí está e vai começar com densos e pesados dias húmidos: massas de ar instável vindas de W e WSW. O litoral vai ser bem regado nos próximos dias...
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