Thanks to all the (deserved) attention we’ve been paying to the floods in Pakistan, the landslides in China, the heat wave and fires in Russia, the roughly 300 hundred forest fires in British Columbia, etc., it’s no surprise that peak oil isn’t right at the top of everyone’s mind. Of course, reality doesn’t care what is or isn’t on our radar screen, and the world’s oil reserves are depleted by another 85 million barrels every day.
But it appears that some people are paying attention, says the Guardian in Peak oil alarm revealed by secret official talks (emphasis added):
Speculation that [UK] government ministers are far more concerned about a future supply crunch than they have admitted has been fuelled by the revelation that they are canvassing views from industry and the scientific community about “peak oil”.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is also refusing to hand over policy documents about “peak oil” – the point at which oil production reaches its maximum and then declines – under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, despite releasing others in which it admits “secrecy around the topic is probably not good”.
Experts say they have received a letter from David Mackay, chief scientific adviser to the DECC, asking for information and advice on peak oil amid a growing campaign from industrialists such as Sir Richard Branson for the government to put contingency plans in place to deal with any future crisis.
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Yet the note of the workshop distributed last year talks about secrecy around the topic being “probably not good”, although it also suggests officials stick to the line that the “International Energy Agency is an authoritative source in this field” and stresses how the IEA believes there is sufficient reserves to meet demand till 2030 as long as investment in new reserves is maintained.
But the Paris-based organisation has come under increasing scrutiny from a growing group of critics who believe the IEA’s optimism is misplaced. Last year the Guardian revealed that the IEA was also riven with dissent over the issue with senior staff members privately telling newspaper they thought the official numbers on future global oil supply were over-optimistic.
The IEA predicted in the 2009 World Energy Outlook published last November that oil demand would grow from 85m barrels a day today to 88m in 2015 and reach 105m in 2030. The organisation presumes the challenge of meeting that demand can equally be met by a mixture of higher Opec production and considerably more output from unconventional sources.
But an internal IEA source said: “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.”
First of all, the fact that such a workshop was held doesn’t prove that peak oil is real or imminent, although I would argue that both points are true. But it does show that some government officials are at least aware of the problem and consider it a serious situation. That’s a pretty small victory compared to the scale of our current sustainability challenges, but it’s better than nothing.
I suspect that post peak, by perhaps 5 or 10 years, we’ll hear a lot about the behind-the-scenes discussions at the IEA and other groups and even governments, and the overall picture will be infuriating. We’ll hear about repeated attempts by people to raise the issue with their organizational superiors, only to be shunned and silenced. We may even hear from one or two individuals who has the courage to say along the lines of, “We didn’t see peak oil because we didn’t want to see it.”
The problem here, of course, is that old bugaboo, timing. As many have pointed out before, if we’re “lucky” and the peak in world oil production really is 20 years away, that still leaves us very little time to transition away from it, given the extent of the developed world’s dependence on it and the time needed to convert country-level infrastructures. But if those who think we’re much closer to a production peak turn out to be right, then we have a problem of staggering proportions.
The one glimmer of good news is that there’s a fundamental difference between peak oil and climate change: When we de-oil some segment of an economy, it’s done and its history doesn’t matter. I.e. trade in your gasoline powered car for a Nissan Leaf and the world gets 100% of the benefit of that conversion, regardless of how much gasoline your old car burned in the years you drove it. In climate change we’re dealing with not just the CO2 we’re emitting right now, but the legacy emissions of the last 200+ years which will continue to cause warming and its attendant knock-on effects for a long time.
