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Chris Nelder’s Notes on 2008 ASPO-USA Conference
Chris Nelder, ASPO-USA
These are merely my notes, of the key points I picked up during the conference. I hope these notes will be useful to others as an index to the volumes of material that were covered. Any errors or omissions are undoubtedly mine. Please send any comments/corrections to me.
My coverage is no doubt incomplete because I can only type so fast and much of the material went by very quickly. Consider this document an index, and go back to the source presentations to double-check the data.
My personal comments are shown in [brackets]. (?) indicates information that I probably got wrong.
Since no one can be in two places at once, I could only cover part of the split sessions that occurred simultaneously. So coverage of these sessions is limited.
(14 October 2008)
In spite of Chris’s modesty, his collection of notes is lengthy and detailed – one of the best overviews I’ve seen. -BA
Simmons: The only way is down
The Economist via Boomers Bank
The high priest of “peak oil” thinks world oil output can now only decline
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FOR a man who believes that the world as we know it is coming to an end, as least as far as energy is concerned, Matthew Simmons is remarkably cheerful. He magnanimously excuses The Economist’s poor record of predicting the price of oil: our suggestion in 1999 that oil would remain dirt cheap was conventional wisdom at the time, he says soothingly. He also shrugs off our more recent scepticism about his belief that the world’s production of oil has peaked: he, too, hopes that “peak oil” proves to be a myth, he says. But over a 40-year career in investment banking, Mr Simmons adds, he has learnt never to rely on wishful thinking. Most of the world’s oil analysts, he believes, are far too optimistic about how long existing fields will last, the prospects for new discoveries, technology’s ability to unlock new sources and to extend the life of existing ones, and so on. He prefers to rely on data rather than daydreams. And according to the American government’s own numbers, the world’s oil output has been more-or-less flat since 2005.
It was data that made Mr Simmons famous. He spent the summer of 2003 at his holiday home in Maine, poring over technical studies describing the state of Saudi Arabia’s oilfields. Although the Saudi authorities do not release much evidence to support their claims of vast oil reserves, engineers from Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil firm, do give talks at conferences and publish papers about their experience of reservoir modelling and management. Based on these, Mr Simmons concluded that Saudi Arabia’s biggest fields were already past their peaks, required ever more expensive technological fixes to prop up production and would soon enter a period of inevitable and rapid decline.
(10 July 2008, but just posted)
Energy prices drive inflation to 16-year high
Ashley Seager, The Guardian
Inflation shot up to a 16-year high of 5.2% last month, as electricity and gas prices rose at their fastest rate since records began in 1948. But economists believe the figure will mark a high point, and predict inflation could be down to 1% within a year thanks to tumbling oil and food prices.
Inflation on the consumer price index measure increased more than expected, up from 4.7% in August and the highest since March 1992. The rise was due to the summer’s peak in oil prices feeding through to higher electricity and gas prices, up almost 40% since September last year. Most energy companies raised domestic prices last month in response to oil prices, which reached a peak of nearly $150 a barrel. Yesterday oil was trading close to $80.
(15 October 2008)
