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Peak oil theorist goes mainstream in Cape Town
Quentin Wray (editor), Business Report (IOL)
It takes a confident person to stand up in front of a hall packed with oil investors to talk peak oil theory. But it’s an indication of the extent to which peak oil has captured the public imagination that a proponent of the theory was invited to present his views to the Oil Africa conference in Cape Town.
UK Energy Institute researcher Chris Skrebowski kicked off by outlining three stages of how an unpopular idea becomes a dominant belief: initially, proponents are portrayed as being insane; then comes the begrudging possibility that their theories may be right (with the proviso that they are not particularly important); and lastly, the former sceptics project the attitude that they “knew it all along”. Skrebowski says some people are in this final stage.
Peak oil theory, he says, is incorrectly characterised by its critics as the notion that the world is running out of oil.
The more accurate definition of peak oil would be the point at which the amount of production capacity that the world is losing due to depletion starts to exceed the rate at which upstream producers can bring new flows on stream.
His personal belief is that the world is within about 1 200 days of the peak point, which puts it somewhere in mid-2011.
(19 March 2008)
Skrebowski in South Africa: Doomsday scenario for oil
Michael Hamlyn, iafrica
A gloomy forecast about the future of the oil industry – looking forward to a possible Doomsday within a very few years – was given to the Sub-Saharan oil, gas and petrochemical conference in Cape Town on Tuesday.
Chris Skrebowski, a researcher for the Energy Institute in Britain, told delegates that the oil supply will peak in 2011 or 2012 at around 93 million barrels a day, that oil supply in international trade will peak earlier than the oil production peak, and he forecast: “There will be supply shortfalls in winter before peak.”
Skrebowski said that latest BP statistics showed that peak is already happening in some regions. “OECD production peaked in 1997 and has now declined by 2.2 million barrels a day (10.4 percent),” he said.
“Non-Opec, non-former Soviet Union production peaked in 2002, and has now declined by 771 000 barrels a day (2.15 percent). North America/Mexico peaked in 1997. North Sea – UK/Norway/Denmark peaked in 2000 and has now declined by 1.6 million barrels a day (25.4 percent).”
The figures show, he said, that around 28 significant producers are in decline, and that about 35 percent of global production comes from the decliners. Once that figure reaches 51 percent “we reach global peak oil”, he said.
Peak oil will be earlier than most expect, Skrebowski told delegates. And he explained that global production falls when loss of output from countries in decline exceeds gains in output from those that are expanding.
(18 March 2008)
Related coverage of the talk:
The Citizen
Engineering News
Dispatch
An EROEI Review
Robert Rapier, The Oil Drum
I can be a very persistent (hard-headed?) person. If someone doesn’t understand something that I think is important – and readily understandable – I will often continue to explain it until I am sure they either understand it and won’t admit it, or they are incapable of understanding it. Because the topic of EROEI continues to be misunderstood (especially by those in the camp of “the only thing that matters is economics”), I will once again try.
Nate Hagens and I have discussed this subject at length on a number of occasions. He has written extensively on it, and I don’t pretend that this essay can hold a candle to his magnum opus – and in my opinion best ever EROEI essay written at TOD – A Net Energy Parable – Why is EROI Important? (There’s your dopamine fix for today, Nate.) This is just a little review of why I think EROEI matters.
(18 March 2008)
Why We Can’t Quit
Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek
At the age of 7, when most kids are climbing trees, John Hess was surveying foreign oilfields. The son of Leon Hess, a forceful entrepreneur who built a small home-heating business in New Jersey into a global oil company, the younger Hess immersed himself in the oil world from an early age, studying Arabic and Farsi to better connect with Middle Eastern oil executives. Now the CEO of Hess Corp., he’s become an advocate for energy conservation and investment in alternative fuels. NEWSWEEK’S Fareed Zakaria spoke to him about the new world of $100-a-barrel oil, and the likelihood of an energy crisis. Excerpts:
… Are you pessimistic about the future?
To date, a total of 1 trillion barrels of oil have been produced, and it’s conventionally understood that we have 2 trillion barrels left in the ground. That leads a lot of people to assume things are going to be fine. Unfortunately, the frontiers are getting more difficult to access, and some oil-producing nations are giving priority to their political agendas. The IEA [International Energy Agency] predicts global demand to average 98.5 million barrels a day in 2015; it’s hard to see how we can meet that level of production. To have sustainable economic growth 10 years from now, both consumers and producers need to start acting now.
(19 March 2008)
Contributor Daniel Dow writes:
Displays some false hope in techno-fixes, but a frank discussion about future supply issues from an oil industry insider.
