Here’s a transcript of Julian Darley’s recent interview with Chris Skrebowski.

I highly recommend you take a few minutes and read the whole thing. But just to tease you a bit, I’ll include some excerpts.

On the EWG report:

Julian Darley: This is at least a dramatic a report as has been released, I think, by any official or semi-official organ. Why should people take this seriously?

Chris Skrebowski: I think when you look at it and it’s publically available through the energywatchgroup.org website, you will see that it’s a very carefully done piece of work, for they’ve developed a methodology that’s basically a production based methodology. But they’ve also looked at the sort of underlying reserves, and they’ve come up with figures. They’ve contrasted these with the sort of industry data-base figures from IHS Energy. It’s a pretty solid piece of work. There’s a mildly amusing piece of circumstantial confirmation, which is that the legendary Texan oil man, T. Boone Pickens has made not millions, but billions betting against the oil industry conventional wisdom, has just announced that he thinks we have hit peak oil and that it will go down pretty rapidly from here on in. So, I wouldn’t wish to bet against Mr. Pickens. He’s got a good track record for actually getting it right, and we have a very careful report, very thorough report, which seems to be saying the same thing. So, yes, it’s fairly unnerving that this may be the start of a very major social and economic upheaval.

On production from tar sands:

Julian Darley: Are you foreseeing, in fact, an earlier peak for tar sands’ output?

Chris Skrebowski: I think, I think at this stage it is just too early to tell; but, it is a plausible and ultimately a respectable argument to say that if you can’t get the economics to add up well as the ores become leaner, you probably would have a tar sands peak, and that it would decline.

Julian Darley: And the tar sands peak, not in 50 years’ time, but rather sooner?

Chris Skrebowski: Yes, it would be in the 2015, 2020 era.

[See the interview for more detail on tar sands.]

On independent oil companies (what we in the US typically mean when we talk about “the oil companies”–the big, corporate entities like ExxonMobil, etc.):

Julian Darley: One of the other interesting graphs that they show in their executive summary and in the full report is the situation for, what I call, the international oil companies, the IOCs. The outlook is not looking terribly healthy for them in general.

Chris Skrebowski: No, no. This is a graph that, I think, will come as an unpleasant surprise to a large number of people because what this very clearly demonstrates is that by the first quarter of this year the big international oil companies were actually producing little more than they had been producing ten years earlier, in the first quarter of 1997. They did improve the production in intervening periods, and very roughly it looks as though they got to their highest level, maybe their peak, in the first quarter of 2004. The other thing that’s very clear from this graph is that the mergers between the various companies have not led to any great synergies in terms of expanding production. If you merge Chevron’s production and Texaco’s production, then it goes into Chevron-Texaco production, it’s basically the sum of the two earlier bids. Similarly with Total Fina and Elf; BP and Amoco and ARCO, and Mobile and Exxon. Quite remarkable.

And some more on the EWG report and the underlying methodology:

Julian Darley: You’ve been an oil industry analyst for a fair number of decades now, with experience with BP and the Saudi Arabians, amongst many others, and you’ve also been doing the seminal work on the oil field’s mega projects, which gives you a kind of special insight into the likely future production. So what do you make of this report? Do you think it’s more or less right? Is it congruent with your expectations?

Chris Skrebowski: Not quite, but I have to respect the fact that this is a very comprehensive report. They’ve gone back to fundamental sources, they’ve checked and they’ve come to their conclusions. My own conclusion, which, if you like, if fairly dependant on information that’s publicly available, and I think this report actually had access to some that’s less publicly available. So my work, basically tells us that if everyone does what they say they’re going to do, and all the things work as they are expected to - that’s a pretty heroic assumption - we could get out to about 2011, but no further. Now, what that means is that you would find an envelope of where you could get to, and then everything that goes wrong brings you back in time that envelope. What the Energy Watch Group, in effect, is saying is there are enough things that are going wrong, not working as people might have hoped, to bring us all the way back to it being an immediate peak now. And it’s certainly true that if you look at a standard production series, like the IEA production series, you find that we’ve been on this sort of bumpy plateau since January or February 2005. That’s nearly 30 months that we’ve been sort of bumping along without succeeding in getting the production significantly higher.

Again, please read it all, and you can directly download the full EWG report (101 page, 1.7MB PDF).