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Energy: Shell’s future scenarios – Staring into energy’s black hole
Toby Webb, Ethical Corporation
Shell’s “energy scenarios” see fossil fuels remaining a huge part of the energy mix to 2050. But are they realistic? And if Shell is right, what does it mean for the planet’s future?
… [in June] Shell chief executive Jeroen van der Veer was making some rather bleak predictions about the future of the planet. “Energy demand will double between now and 2050,” he told his 200-strong audience of Shell executives, think-tankers, academics and journalists. Between now and 2050, world population is set to grow from six to nine billion people, who will all want access to transport and electricity. This means the era of easy oil and gas is over, according to van der Veer. “We have only seen the beginning” of carbon dioxide emissions problems, he said.
These are the hard truths about the future of energy supply and demand that Shell says the world needs to tackle, somehow, in the next few years.
… Perhaps the most alarming two facts to emerge from Shell’s scenario planning are the uncertainty around predictions of future energy supply and the potential, or lack of it, of carbon capture and storage technology. No-one knows exactly when “peak oil” – the moment when more of the planet’s oil is out of the ground than left in it – will be reached and what the ramifications for global economics, unrest and politics will be.
… In its “Energy scenarios to 2050” report, Shell is, for the first time, comfortable in discussing the contentious notion of “peak oil” – the moment when oil production flattens out and then heads towards terminal decline, as more oil has been extracted from the ground than is left in it.
Shell predicts that global oil production will peak around 2020. But the company neatly side-steps the debate in its scenarios by predicting in both the Scramble and Blueprints scenarios that the decline rate of global production will be virtually negligible up to 2040.
David Strahan is surprised that Shell’s oil peak estimation is now 2020. “I haven’t heard them say that before,” he says. The world has already reached the beginnings of a global oil peak, he argues
(6 July 2008)
Special report.
Allianz predicts oil price of $200 a barrel in next 2 years
AFP via MarketWatch
BERLIN (AFP) — German insurance giant Allianz expects the oil price to hit $200 a barrel in the next two years, according to a press report to be published Monday.
“I cannot imagine that post-2010 we will have an oil price of below $200 a barrel in the long term,” Allianz board member Joachim Faber told Monday’s edition of Der Tagesspiegel newspaper.
(6 July 2008)
School’s out: let the summer begin (PDF)
Matthew R. Simmons, Simmons & Co. International
Slides for a talk given at an investor conference in Austin, Texas.
(12 June 2008)
