Twice a year, a group of experts release a ranked list of the world’s most powerful computers called TOP500. It is likely that the new list in June will have a new member of the Top 10 of the Top 500: a computer dubbed Pangea. Its output is is 2.3 petaflops. A petaflop is a quadrillion “floating-point operations per second.” Today’s desktop computers deal in gigaflops, or billions.

The system is the fastest commercially-owned computer in the world. The other faster computers on TOP500′s list are owned by governments or academic institutions and therefore used for research.

Pangea is owned by Total SA, the fifth-largest oil and gas company in the world. So the supercomputer will not be changing the future of health care IT like former Jeopardy champion Watson or revolutionizing climate projections and weather research like supercomputers at NCAR and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It will be searching for oil and gas, according to Reuters.

Pangea helped analyze seismic data from Total’s Kaombo project in Angola in just nine days, instead of the four and a half months it would have taken with its previous computer, Philippe Malzac, IT director at Total’s Exploration division, told Reuters:

Total trumps British rival BP with the 2.3-petaflop supercomputer. BP said last December it was building a 2 petaflop supercomputing facility in Houston, Texas.

“Our competitors are also working on these kind of algorithms, but we think this is giving us a head start,” Malzac said.

The price of the system is undisclosed, but it will cost nearly $20 million per year just to run Pangea. The technological achievement may be impressive, but the reality is that oil and gas reserves are finite and getting more expensive to extract, while renewable fuels like wind and solar are getting cheaper to utilize.

Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a lead author on the third IPCC Assessment Report, explained last month in Slate that it is getting harder and more expensive to squeeze oil out of the ground.
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On Monday, USA Today reported that the price of gasoline hit $3.60 a gallon for the first time since October — an early start in comparison to the usual price rise seen in the spring. The increase occurred despite world oil production climbing to 88.8 million barrels per day in 2012, about 2 million barrels higher than two years ago according to the Washington Post’s Brad Plumer. And about half of that increased production is due to an oil boom in the United States that’s driven imported oil to its lowest level since 1987.

That increased oil production will bring down gas prices is one of the most reliable Republican canards when it comes to energy, so what gives?

As Plumer points out, “The big thing to remember is that oil prices are a function of both supply and demand. If world demand for oil rises faster than producers can pump the stuff out, prices will go up.” Plumer cites a piece by James Hamilton of UC San Diego, which shows China’s consumption of oil is booming, and that the world economy as a whole is growing apace — and thus demanding more oil — even as fuel efficiency increases.

Technically, the world isn’t even producing enough oil to keep pace with the rise in global incomes. Oil supply has risen by 2.3 percent since 2010. But the world economy has grown by 7.1 percent since then. The only reason that oil prices haven’t soared to record highs, Hamilton points out, is that countries have been undertaking new conservation measures. Americans, for instance, are buying more fuel-efficient cars in droves.

Granted, oil prices would almost certainly be even higher than they are now without the drilling boom over the past two years in places like North Dakota. But at this point, the extra drilling is struggling to keep up with the pace of global economic growth.

Here are the global production and consumption numbers for the last few years from the U.S. Energy Information Agency (note the numbers to the left start at 84,000 thousand barrels per day):

And despite forecasts from BP and the International Energy Agency that domestic and global oil production will continue rising, Plumer notes that high gas prices aren’t going away anytime soon:

The [IEA] recently projected that U.S. oil production would continue rising through 2020 and beyond, as companies extract more “unconventional” oil from shale rock and other sources. But global demand was also expected to rise 35 percent between now and 2035, with China on pace to become the largest oil consumer in the world in the next two decades.

And that’s the optimistic scenario. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a geophysical sciences professor at the University of Chicago and a lead author on the third IPCC Assessment Report, recently pointed out in Slate that while going after unconventional oil remains profitable, and thus likely to continue, it requires ever greater effort to retrieve the same amounts of oil:

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UPDATE:  The director responds to comments here.

JR:  Right now, the global economy is a Ponzi scheme.  We created a way of raising standards of living we can’t possibly pass on to our children.  As Tom Friedman reported in 2009, “We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.”

It has to collapse, unless adults stand up now and say, “This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate.”  Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”  I’ve also noted that the 1% can insulate themselves from the collapse far longer than everyone else, with their gated and moated communities, multiple homes in multiple climates, security guards, private jets and general insensitivity to the price of anything — and hence insensitivity to the value of everything.

by Cole Mellino

The new documentary film GrowthBusters had its world premiere in Washington, DC last night. And Climate Progress had a chance to catch up with Director Dave Gardner to chat about why he made the movie.

Gardner, like so many Americans, grew up hooked on growth. He once had a successful career as a corporate film producer, putting together promotional videos for large companies. But his newest film rails against many of those corporations that are trying to keep us addicted to growth.

First, here’s the trailer to the film:

GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth Trailer from Dave Gardner on Vimeo.

GrowthBusters follows Gardner as he questions the push for never-ending economic growth in the U.S. and the world.

“If I have one goal on this planet, it is to make it okay to question growth,” he tells Climate Progress. “I’m not afraid to say I’m against growth.”

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The jury is out on whether Saudi Arabia actually has enough excess or spare production capacity to continue to control the price of oil.  I  discussed that at length in two posts this year (here and here).

What is clear is that the Saudis want to create the impression that they control the price of oil — and that they don’t want oil prices so high that Americans make the shift off of our billion-dollar-a-day addiction too quickly, which is to say, fast enough to preserve a livable climate for our children and countless future generations.

If you need proof, Ben Armbruster of Think Progress Security has this remarkable video of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal on CNN:

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