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 [...]

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 [...]

The petrol station of urban myth that purportedly had a sign on its forecourt offering “free petrol tomorrow” (and tomorrow never comes, right?), possibly inspired a less than successful promotional stunt for computer game Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, at a North London petrol station recently.
Motorists had the opportunity to receive £40 (A$86 approx.) worth [...]

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 [...]

How petrol is putting Sydney under the pump
Of course it’s not just Sydney, or even Australia, that’s feeling the pinch from the ever rising cost of oil, and far from just biting into our bank balances, increasing fuel prices could bring about a radical realignment in the way we live.
Further rises in petrol prices could [...]