Growing demand for oil, versus a gradually dwindling supply, is forcing some oil producers to extract oil from less than optimal sources.
The pressure is on to keep the black stuff flowing and so the next two decades will see an unprecedented effort to exploit increasingly exotic and unconventional sources of oil. They include tar [...]

There is some evidence that petrol fumes may increase aggression, possibly explaining increasing instances of road rage, as populations become exposed to ever rising levels of vehicle-produced pollution.
Heightened aggression may be yet another risk for the human population chronically exposed to urban air polluted by automobile smoke.

Oil production estimates have been over-stated according to a whistle-blower within the International Energy Agency (IEA), and is a revelation that many people do not want publicised.
Now the “peak oil” theory is gaining support at the heart of the global energy establishment. “The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as [...]

A nice gallery of equally nicely designed old oil cans.

February is “cruise season” in Sydney with up to 28 liners stopping here over the next week or so, including the Queen Mary 2 and Dawn Princess.
When Good Magazine compared the fuel efficiency of several modes of travel, including walking and cycling over a distance of 350 miles, they found cruise ships were, by a [...]

Doubling the current US price of petrol, from $4 a gallon, to $8 by way of a tax, could bring about all sorts of benefits… if you can overlook the negatives first that is.
Cheap gas is unfair. Driving creates huge social costs in the form of traffic, health-damaging pollution and global warming that aren’t suffered [...]

Cars were once useful. But now there’s just so many of them, that they get in the way of each other. And our way also. And the environment…
Once a key to the future, the car is now a menace to it. Freedom has given way to gridlock, pleasure to road rage. Even the best – [...]

Awesome time line graphic from Good Magazine, with key dates in the history of our use of oil and petrol, going back to 10,000 BC.
Brings to mind, for some reason, Daniel Plainview’s (Daniel Day-Lewis) line from There Will Be Blood:
“Drainage! Drainage, Eli, you boy. Drained dry. I’m so sorry. Here, if you have a milkshake, [...]

Some of the consequences of rising petrol prices are actually quite positive, including less traffic congestion, reduced pollution, improved health and fitness, and, saving the best for last, possibly even four day work weeks:
[US] Companies, colleges and governments are moving to four-day weeks. Brevard Community College in Cocoa, Fla., went to four days for the [...]

Apparently Earth’s oil reserves are twice the size of published estimates, according to Richard Pike, CEO of the UK Royal Society of Chemistry, who says the inaccurate reporting of the capacity of multiple reservoirs is distorting the overall figure.
Oil companies produce a bell-shaped probability distribution for how much each oil reservoir might hold, and then [...]