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“Peak oil” advocates blast U.S. industry study
Chris Baltimore, Reuters
Proponents of “peak oil” — the theory that global crude oil production has hit its zenith and is headed for a steep decline — are steamed with a U.S. oil industry group’s findings that the world has plenty of oil.
Next week the U.S. National Petroleum Council — a board of high-level U.S. oil industry executives — releases its study titled “Facing the Hard Truths about Energy,” conducted at the behest of Energy Secretary Sam Bodman.
According to the report’s executive summary obtained by Reuters, the world is not running out of oil but there are “accumulating risks” to securing supply through 2030.
Peak oil theorists say such findings gloss over Bodman’s request to study the issue in detail.
“They’ve labored mightily and come up with a mouse,” said Randy Udall at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, whose group dismisses the report as “petro Prozac.”
“Give me four college students and two weeks, and I could do better,” Udall said.
… Such findings irk Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, the Maryland Republican and co-chairman of the Congressional peak oil caucus, who has hounded the Bush administration on the peak oil issue.
“I don’t think (the council) did what they asked them to do,” Bartlett said in his office this week, brandishing a closet-full of charts and graphs that map out various world oil consumption scenarios. “We’re disappointed.”
(13 July 2007)
Nice reporting from Reuters. The article also appears at CNBC. -BA
ASPO-USA Fall World Oil Conference
Rick Block and Dave Cohen, ASPO-USA Early Registration Ends August 1 and Media Policy for Registration now available.
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ASPO-USA has announced early registration will end Aug. 1 and that Media Policy for attending and registration is now available for the the 2007 World Oil Conference at the Hilton Americas Hotel in Houston, Texas on October 17th thru the 20th, 2007. http://www.aspousa.org/aspousa3/index.cfm
Confirmed speakers include
- T. Boone Pickens (pioneer oilman & acquisition expert),
- Houston Mayor Bill White (former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy),
- Bob Hirsch (co-author of the groundbreaking Hirsch-Bezdek Report to DOE),
- Peter Tertzakian (author of “A Thousand Barrels a Second”),
- Matthew Simmons, (author of “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock”),
- Henry Groppe of Groppe, Long & Littell,
- Art Smith of John S. Herold, Inc.,
- U.S. Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (R-Del.),
- Chairman Elizabeth Ames Jones of the Texas Railroad Commission,
- Chris Skrebowski of the London Energy Institute,
- Charles Maxwell of Weeden & Co.,
- David Hughes of the Canadian Geological Survey,
- Jeremy Gilbert of Barrelmore Ltd. (and recently retired Chief Petroleum Engineer for BP),
- Professor Peter Bishop of the University of Houston, and many others.
Other distinguished participants include
- Stuart Staniford of The Oil Drum,
- Richard Nehring of Nehring Associates,
- Roger Duncan, Director of Austin Utilities’ “Plug-in Partners Program” (who will be bringing a Toyota Plug-in Hybrid to the Conference), and
- Tom Whipple, Editor of Falls Creek News and ASPO-USA’s Peak Oil Review and Peak Oil Daily News.
The honorary Co-chairmen of the Conference are Houstonians Matt Simmons of Simmons & Company International, and Art Smith of John S. Herold, Inc.
The Houston Conference agenda will feature technical sessions on Reserves and Production; Substitute Fuels; Peak Oil & Climate Change; Peak Oil Reports from the GAO, National Petroleum Council, and AAPG; a Natural Gas/LNG Update; a Net Energy Update; Mitigation Scenarios; Smart Policy Initiatives (local, state & national); and Smart Money & Investment in the Age of Peak Oil.
ASPO Week in Houston will consist of four days and nights of energy discussion as well as field trips to Refinery Row on the Houston Ship Channel and other sites of interest in the heart of the nation’s refining and petrochemical industries.
ASPO-USA still has DVDs of last years Boston Conference with the intergraded power points available.
For more details on the conference, to register, or purchase the DVDs see the ASPO-USA Website at http://www.aspousa.org/aspousa3/index.cfm
(13 July 2007)
Review of Strahan’s Last Oil Shock
Martyn Wingrove, Lloyd’s List
What they didn’t want you to know: oil’s dirty little secret
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“IT’S the end of the world as we know it”, sang US rock band REM, a sentiment that seems to sum up the ‘hard to live with’ realities that Peak Oil will bring to civilisation’s most affluent cultures.
And it definitely echoes the view of former BBC journalist David Strahan, who admits he knew nothing of the oil industry before starting his research and now wishes the world knew more about geology.
The theory of Peak Oil is simply that world production will peak and plateau at a undefined point in time and then begin to decline while demand continues to rise.
…The Peak Oil theory has gained favour, but in a world more concerned with climate change it has remained on the fringes. That changed this week when the International Energy Agency published its medium-term oil market outlook.
The Paris-based organisation, which advises the world’s largest consumers, said the world could face an oil crunch in five years’ time because producers outside the Middle East are unable to increase supplies at the rate demand is growing, meaning consumers will all be depending on the Opec cartel to pump out more from its fields.
Strahan sheds light, or perhaps doubt, over the estimates for Middle East production capacity and oil reserves, building on research by others such as Houston analyst Matt Simmons, and adding to the argument that oil will start to run out before 2020.
…For consumers, Strahan’s advice is lower your oil use now, get on your bike, sell the car, grow your own vegetables, but don’t panic – yet.
(13 July 2007)
The Round-Up: July 13th 2007
Stoneleigh, The Oil Drum: Canada
In the fields of finance and energy, there have been some remarkable developments this week, particularly with institutions that reverse their stated views, and probably their tactics and policies.
The IEA earlier released a report that said, though not in so many words, that peak oil is near. Then its CEO Claude Mandil gave an interview to Le Monde, in which he said Russia has peaked, and OPEC is not telling the truth about world oil supplies.
S&P and Moody’s, Wall Street’s preferred rating agencies, changed their approach to the ongoing mortgage malaise by downgrading, or threatening to downgrade, many mortgage-based investment grade bonds. This shift will be felt throughout the credit markets, and there may be much more to come. And the UK is now joining the mortgage mayhem crowd.
No such shift for NAR: they predict US home prices will rebound in 2008, though foreclosures rose 87% and a record number of ARM’s will reset this fall.
Meanwhile in Canada, the sovereignty that our government seeks to defend in the Arctic is being undermined at an SPP meeting in Montebello, Quebec.
(13 July 2007)
Headlines and excerpts selected with an eye to peak oil.
ODAC News – 11 July
Douglas Low, The Oil Depletion Analysis Centre
Headlines and commentary from a peak oil perspective.
(11 July 2007)
