10 November 2009

"Peak Oil" again raises its head


I don't know what to make of the graph or the attendant story in the Guardian. Here's the gist:

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves...

"Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources..."

A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was "imperative not to anger the Americans" but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. "We have [already] entered the 'peak oil' zone. I think that the situation is really bad," he added.

The concept of "peak oil" has been proposed, argued, debunked, reproposed for as long as I can remember. It has enormous political and economic implications. There seems to be no way to know whom to believe; there are no disinterested parties.

Offered for your consideration; I don't have an opinion...

2 comments:

  1. I am inclined to buy into peak oil for a few reasons:

    -Earth is finite and therefore all material on earth is finite. since oil is a material on earth, it is finite. Hence we will eventually reacha a point where it will run out.

    -On a more serious note though peak oil is not about oil physically running out, but about the inability to to bring new production online fast enough to make up for both demand growth and existing field depletetion. It isn't so much a question of quantity but of flow. If we can move away from oil (as in decrease demand) this problem will be somewhat mitigated. There may be a baseline level of oil we can produce for a long time which, while being below current levels, would serve the demand and make up for other field loses.

    The problem, of course, being that the world is showing no signs of slowing down oil consumption during times of economic growth and is on the brink of greatly accelerating it as China and India become richer. On top of that newer fields are harder to develop (off-shore or shale fields), tend to require more processing to remove partoculate matter and there does not appear to be an abundant supply of a fuel alternative availble yet.

    The question is will the price of oil increase steadily as the oil supply situation deteriorates, spurring technical innovation to cope or quickly, shocking the system and causing cascading damage across the worldwide economy.

    I don't know and in all likelihood no one does given the secretive nature of national oil companies reserves and production profiles. Compounded with the use of oil futures as finacial tools whose prices do not reflect supply fundamentals and the market cannot even give us a transparent set of expectationss for future price.

    So to sume up: unless the world can greatly reduce demand, we will reach a point where the flow of oil will be insufficient to meet the demand of oil. If that is in 5, 10 50 or 100 years I don't know, but as you said, everyone offering guesses has their own agenda.

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  2. Oh, you got us. There is so much oil it's infinite, in fact the more we use the more gets formed under the ground. It's really great, I mean who would think anything would actually run out or even get low? It's scientifically proven- oil is the only resource that never runs out.
    It's a huge conspiracy, for every barrel reported in reserves there are 20,000,000,000,000 they are not telling us about. It's just to keep the prices up. Nothing but speculation caused this last peak of 140/barrel. I mean who would want to turn up the spigot if they could at the highest price in history? No one, that's who. They'd just end up with an ungodly amount of money for just turning a couple of valves open a little more. Just don't look into Cantaerrell fields in Mexico, they 'coulda if they wanted to but didn't.
    Listen to the pros and official agencies, they got the average person grossing less than 100K/year in their best interest, not those who earn millions.

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