See this page for a downloadable MP3 file from Purdue University, “After Oil.” It’s a big download and earful–about 59MB, running 51 minutes. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, so this is more a promising link I’m tossing out as opposed to a recommendation.

In Caspian, Big Oil Fights Ice, Lethal Fumes — and Kazakhs:

Since an unlikely alliance of Western oil companies received rights to drill for oil here a decade ago, they’ve struggled to cope with a combination of rig-wrecking ice packs, bone-chilling winters and noxious, high-pressure gases. Yesterday, the consortium’s bid to exploit one of the world’s top oil deposits encountered its biggest challenge yet: Kazakhstan’s government, stung by delays and rising costs, suspended the group’s permit for the field, halting work there for the next three months.

“From today, work on Kashagan will be frozen,” said a Kazakh official.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the project had been shut down. The field’s operator, Italy’s Eni SpA, declined to comment, saying only that consortium representatives were meeting yesterday with local authorities. Sources close to the negotiations said the delay was an attempt by the Kazakh government to pressure Eni and squeeze additional money out of the project.

Highly recommended, this is a longish article about the challenges, politics, and economics of Kashagan.

Notice that a graphic in the article says the current estimate for the production from Kashagan is 250,000 barrels/day by 2011. In terms of assessing the impact of this field on alleviating the upward price pressure from the oil crunch in the short term, flow rate is more meaningful than the total size of the reserves. And for those who simply must know, the estimate for Kashagan’s recoverable oil is 9 to 13 billion barrels of oil, meaning that at 250,000 barrels/day, it would take just over 98 years to extract it all. Anyone here think we’ll still be willing to pay the price, monetary and otherwise, to extract oil from Kashagan a century from now?

Once again I find myself reading a news item and trying to gauge What It Really Means. Aside from the fairly obvious desire on the part of Kazakhstan to delay production and sell this oil later at a higher price, which is just another implicit admission that the peak is very close and the crunch is here, I wonder: Would it be better for humanity to keep this oil in the ground for now? I think the answer is pretty obviously yes. Less cheap oil now means higher prices, a stronger and more consistent market signal to transition away from oil, less consumption and less CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, and more of an emergency supply for the coming years if we truly need it.

Whenever I express such views on this site or at a presentation, I inevitably hear objections from people who think we should do everything we can to keep oil prices down now because something wonderful (and delightfully unspecified) will happen in the near future to make all that nasty sacrifice unnecessary. I think this is the height of insanity and myopia, not to mention generational selfishness. But maybe that’s just me.