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Leggett: At Poznan, no one is listening
Jeremy Leggett, Guardian
Another year passes, another climate change summit arrives, the 14th in the annual series. The community of nations have been talking for more than 18 years now about how to stop humanity’s remorseless effort to cook its own home. These gabfests have largely been action-free zones. I have attended too many of them, but this year it was time to risk my blood-pressure on another.
I took the train to Poland, a prospect that sounds like a recipe for slow-travel hell, but in fact was both easy and productive.
… One of my missions was an effort to raise the peak oil issue. I suspect that most of the 9,000-plus attendees – diplomats, lobbyists and journalists – may have little idea how strong the evidence is that a global energy crisis lurks just a few years in the future, and that it will have massive implications for climate change policymaking.
Some of that evidence was aired by the International Energy Agency at an open meeting on its recently-completed World Energy Outlook 2008. Between the lines of the IEA’s latest weighty annual lies an early warning of a premature peak in global oil production. I say “between the lines”, because the IEA is a somewhat inconsistent organisation. Set up by developed governments essentially to promote fossil fuels, it has to wrestle with considerable internal tensions when warning both of fossil fuel depletion and the environmental impacts of fossil fuel burning. These tensions are often discernible in the wording of the agency’s committee-written reports, and in public presentations by its officials.
(11 December 2008)
IEA: Everyone Gets to Be Right
Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute
In recent days our friends over at The Oil Drum have done a laudable job of dissecting the recent annual report of the International Energy Agency, “World Energy Outlook 2008”.
Briefly: the report breaks ground in analyzing petroleum depletion and future supply prospects on the basis of a study of several hundred large oilfields. It warns that “Current global trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable” and that “the sources of oil to meet rising demand, the cost of producing it and the prices that consumers will need to pay for it . . . [are all now] extremely uncertain.” The document also proclaims in no uncertain terms that “the era of cheap oil is over.”
At the same time, WEO 2008 forecasts no world peak in oil production before 2030, as long as extraordinarily large investments are made in exploration and in the production of unconventional liquid fuels. (This conclusion is disputed by Oil Drum writers, whose analysis suggests that the IEA report authors started with the conclusion they wanted—no peak before 2030—and then massaged the data vigorously until that conclusion could be supported with appropriate graphs and text).
Some commentators have noted the inconsistency in the tone of the document and have suggested that this results from disagreement between two camps within the IEA, one of which “gets” Peak Oil, while the other refuses to take the notion seriously. The report resolves the debate in a way that is likely to shape official and mainstream media discourse for years to come.
(10 December 2008)
Oil Demand Down; 1st Time Since ’83
Jad Mouawad, New York Times
Global oil consumption will drop this year for the first time since 1983, as an economic downturn in the West and slower consumption in China will reduce demand, according to the world’s main energy forecaster.
The International Energy Agency, an adviser to industrialized nations, said on Thursday that it expected oil demand this year to drop by 200,000 barrels a day to 85.8 million barrels a day. The new forecast is 350,000 barrels a day less than the agency’s last monthly report.
The energy agency expects consumption to recover somewhat next year, although at a much slower pace, as the global economy recovers in the second half of 2009. It sees consumption growing by 0.5 percent, or 400,000 barrels a day. That is still 260,000 barrels a day less than forecast last month.
(11 December 2008)
World oil demand to grow in 2009: IEA
David Sheppard, Reuters
World oil demand growth will return in 2009 despite shrinking this year for the first time since 1983 due to the global economic slowdown, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Thursday.
The IEA’s view is in stark contrast to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which on Tuesday said demand is expected to shrink by 450,000 barrels per day in 2009 following a predicted 50,000 bpd decline in 2008.
(11 December 2008)
