Monbiot on the IEA: At Last, A Date

[GliderGuider]

At Last, A Date

If you ask, the government always produces the same response: "Global oil resources are adequate for the foreseeable future." It knows this, it says, because of the assessments made by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its World Energy Outlook reports. In the 2007 report, the IEA does appear to support the government's view. "World oil resources," it states, "are judged to be sufficient to meet the projected growth in demand to 2030," though it says nothing about what happens at that point, or whether they will continue to be sufficient after 2030.

So the IEA had better be right. In the report on peak oil commissioned by the US department of energy, the oil analyst Robert L Hirsch concluded that "without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs" of world oil supplies peaking "will be unprecedented". He went on to explain what "timely mitigation" meant. Even a worldwide emergency response "10 years before world oil peaking", he wrote, would leave "a liquid-fuels shortfall roughly a decade after the time that oil would have peaked". To avoid global economic collapse, we need to begin "a mitigation crash programme 20 years before peaking". If Hirsch is right, and if oil supplies peak before 2028, we're in deep doodah.

So burn this into your mind: between 2007 and 2008 the IEA radically changed its assessment

(snip)

Then I asked him (Birol) a question for which I didn't expect a straight answer: could he give me a precise date by which he expects conventional oil supplies to stop growing?

"In terms of non-Opec (countries outside the big oil producers' cartel)," he replied, "we are expecting that in three, four years' time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. In terms of the global picture, assuming that Opec will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is, of course, not good news from a global-oil-supply point of view."

Around 2020. That casts the issue in quite a different light. Birol's date, if correct, gives us about 11 years to prepare. If the Hirsch report is right, we have already missed the boat. Birol says we need a "global energy revolution" to avoid an oil crunch, including (disastrously for the environment) a massive global drive to exploit unconventional oils, such as the Canadian tar sands. But nothing on this scale has yet happened, and Hirsch suggests that even if it began today, the necessary investments and infrastructure changes could not be made in time. Birol told me: "I think time is not on our side here."

On edit: Remember, this is from the IEA, an organization with political masters. That means there is a better-than-even chance that even Birol's new acquaintance with Jesus has left him soft-pedaling the truth.

Second edit: OPEC invest in a timely manner? In this financial environment? Birol's less sanguine estimate is a production rate of 25 mbpd of conventional crude by 2030. That would leave us facing a drop of 50% in the world all-liquids oil supply in just 21 years.

[IDemo]

1. Which of his beliefs strains credibility more?

1 - Jesus loves me.

2 - There has been a 262B barrel reserve in existence for prit-near twenty years in the Saudi desert, a number
that magically increased overnight from about 190 billion, and which will only grow larger....

The second one pretty well equates to believing Adam and Eve rode a stegosaurus to church every Sunday.

[cedric]

2. Interview with Fatih Birol of the IEA

On the following link

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/15/oil-peak-energy-iea