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Oilmen in troubled waters
Jeremy Leggett, The Guardian
For a bearer of bad news, the Opec conference is less of a lion’s den than it was. But some of the speakers still have strong ostrich tendencies
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An unseasonably steamy Vienna. A vast petroleum engineering conference in Opec’s home city. These days, the oil and gas industry cannot gather without at least some effort to talk about climate change, and I had long ago accepted an invitation to speak, forgetting that just because you put something in the diary months in advance it does not mean that you will be any less preoccupied come the day.
The session I am due to speak in is a fringe meeting, on the oil industry’s need to get involved in renewable energy. Hardly core business. None the less, several hundred attend. The topic is hot.
…Talking like this to the oil industry is not the lion’s-den experience it was a few years ago. They do their best, but their resistance is somehow half-hearted. The first questioner, for instance, refers me to the Club of Rome, whose doomy predictions of resource depletion and environmental degradation proved wrong in the last century. My argument reminds him of that episode. If that gets you to sleep at night these days, sir, I’m happy for you. But it doesn’t work for me, or for many, many, like me. And some of us are in boardrooms.
…Then comes the man from BP. He is more convincing, but he knows where the story is weak. “We will be investing $8bn in low-carbon technologies over the next 10 years,” he says. “Jeremy would say this was a pittance, compared with our oil investments.” Too right. As I like to say to these guys, given half a chance, they haven’t exactly shown the same entrepreneurial zeal on the frontiers of the solar revolution that they have for a century on the frontiers of the hydrocarbon age.
Questions, finally, for the three of us, this time including from people who obviously want their industry to envision a step change. What is missing? one of them asks. What do we need to really make a difference? Leadership, I replied, leadership in industry and government. We need policies and plans consistent with our rhetoric. Our economies, ecosystems and civilisation are at risk of holocaust. This is increasingly an accepted, uncontroversial, view. We have to mobilise as though for war. We need Churchills.
(14 June 2006)
Power shifts to countries with oil reserves
Bhushan Bahree and Chip Cummins, Wall Street Journal via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
There is more to today’s oil crunch than temporary jolts to supply and demand. What is also roiling the energy world is an enduring shift in the balance of power between the fuel-guzzling West and oil-rich developing countries.
Since World War II, the industrialized world has relied on stable and affordable supplies of crude to fuel economic growth. The U.S., Europe and Japan together needed more oil than they could produce. The developing world had plenty of oil, but little use for it and few alternative markets. So industrialized countries tapped the cheap resources of poor ones.
Now this mutual dependency is unraveling and a new order is taking shape, turning the tables on America, its allies and other big energy consumers. Major exporting nations have concluded that they have more leverage than ever before over consuming countries.
…It doesn’t appear that the planet is running out of crude, as proponents of the “peak oil” theory have argued. But some oil experts foresee the big Western oil companies running out of easy-to-tap oil, and most of them are already turning to harder-to-recover reserves.
…With new crude supplies lagging behind demand growth, a new energy economy is emerging in which a mosaic of other fuels will supplement crude, some energy experts contend.
…The International Energy Agency, the industrialized world’s energy-market watchdog, has forecast that world oil demand will rise 37 percent by 2030, to 115 million barrels a day from about 85 million today. But the oil-producing nations with the greatest pumping potential either will not or cannot tap their resources sufficiently to meet those projections.
(14 June 2006)
Ironically, even though the Wall Street Journal says it takes a skeptical stance towards peak oil, it confirms all the predictions by peak oilers that we are near the peak, for example, “running out of easy-to-tap oil.” -BA
ASPO-5 Conference Program released
AF, EB
The preliminary program of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil annual conference has been released. The conference will take place on 18-19 July 2006 in Pisa, Italy.
While there will be the usual important technical presentation, this year’s conference looks set to introduce some wider issues with the contribution of Transition Culture’s Rob Hopkins, systems ecologist Folke Gunther, the Community Solution’s Faith Morgan and ever versatile Richard Heinberg.
The line up also includes Limits To Growth author Dennis Meadows, Charles Hall, co-originator of the EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested) concept, Jeremy Leggett, and representatives from the various international ASPO organisations.
(16 June 2006)
2005 Advancers and Decliners
Stuart Staniford, The Oil Drum
[ Stuart has produced two graphs: one of the top countries experiencing oil production declines over the last four years, the other of the top countries experiencing increases -AF]
I begin the process of digging into the new BP statistics by taking a look at nations whose production increased versus those whose production decreased. Firstly, it’s important to note that overall there was a production increase from 2004-2005, of about 1.1%, but this is significantly smaller than the 3%-4% increases in the prior couple of years. Although production began to plateau towards the end of 2004, because production was noticeably lower in early 2004 than in 2005, there is a year to year increase.
There were some positive notes: near arresting of declines in Indonesia and Oman, and actual reversal in Australia. However, these were dominated by worsening declines in the US and the North Sea. Overall, the declining group accelerated from 900kb/d per year to 1100kb/d in declines.
(15 June 2006)
