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Watching the Watchdog
The International Energy Administration is, supposedly, the gold standard for projections of future oil supply. In 2004 they projected that the world would produce 121 million barrels per day of crude oil. In 2005 they lowered that to 115 million bpd. Last year they lowered it again to 106 million bpd. Today, the Guardian reports that a "whistleblower" at the IEA says that even this number is rubbish and the IEA knows it:
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...."The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today's number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.
"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," he added.
....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.
It's pretty much impossible to know how seriously to take this. It's almost certainly true that analysts within the IEA disagree with each other about long-term projections, and it's also probably true that there are regional pressures of various kinds within the organization. That's pretty normal for international groups.
But is the U.S. actively pushing the IEA to produce figures that it knows to be wrong? And are these two anonymous sources the first ones to ever go public with this? Hmmm. I'm not so sure about that. But the IEA's 2009 World Energy Outlook comes out on Tuesday (last year's projections are above), and we'll see what they have to say then.
In the best of times
In the best of times estimating petroleum reserves was a bit like summing swiss bank accounts. I'm not a trader, but does anyone pay attention to these projections? And why Cheney would get angry about them is beyond me.
OK, so do we plan to cap CO2
OK, so do we plan to cap CO2 emissions or not?
If we plan to cap them, then the whole FSCKING POINT is to burn less CO2, so this, while interesting, is hardly a big deal.
If we don't plan to cap them, we'll have bigger problems than lack of oil soon enough, as crop production falls.
There's a massive air of unreality about CO2. Even the people who claim to take it seriously seem unable to hook up the fact that this will mean, NEEDS to mean, that less oil et al gets burned. Caps, or taxes, are not some weird goal in themselves --- they are supposed to reduce burning; if they don't do that, what's the damn point?
"If we don't plan to cap
"If we don't plan to cap them, we'll have bigger problems than lack of oil soon enough, as crop production falls."
I don't think that's correct. By "soon enough" you mean, "within the next decade or two." But if the IEA is wrong about oil, those problems will roll out within the next 3-to-5 years. The car is in your driveway now, it will need more gas tomorrow. The fact that the economy is fucked is what's been preventing declines in oil production from being more of an issue. If the economy grows, energy demand will grow. If we cannot produce the energy, that will prevent the economy from growing, and us from investing in alternate technology. It's a vicious sea-saw. Transitioning away from fossil fuels will require time and money, and if we don't have them we're in big trouble.
Yeah, but Maynard is talking
Yeah, but Maynard is talking about problems arising from climate change (e.g, crop failures), and those are not going to roll in 3-5 years.
Yeah, but Maynard is talking
Yeah, but Maynard is talking about problems arising from climate change (e.g, crop failures), and those are not going to roll in 3-5 years.
Interesting report. Not sure
Interesting report. Not sure how much of a bombshell this is. I think the IEA was known for optimistic figures among those who looked at this seriously. Probably a lot of traders and such don't really care. Their time horizon is no more than six months to a year out. The bigger players such as governments and the oil companies probably have their own figures.
Over at www.theoildrum.com there have been endless discussions about peak oil and the aftermath.
I think the biggest puzzle is what do high level government officials believe and what plans have been made? The CIA has been tracking world resources for a long time. Surely this is no surprise.
Are there plans and is there political will to help the greatest number get through this or is there a cadre of elites that hope to survive and let the rest of us fend for ourselves? Will we pull together or fragment into various incompatible groups?
Will the system fail gracefully producing a soft landing in a lower tech world or will we face a series of sharp declines? For example, if we can't keep the whole electric grid going it will be hard to keep much at all of it going. If large swaths of the country/world go dark that will change life dramatically in an instant.
"For example, if we can't
"For example, if we can't keep the whole electric grid going it will be hard to keep much at all of it going. If large swaths of the country/world go dark that will change life dramatically in an instant."
Very little of the electricity grid depends on oil; it depends on coal and gas. Oil affects transportation.
legbone's connected to the hipbone...
"Very little of the electricity grid depends on oil; it depends on coal and gas. Oil affects transportation."
Yes. And maintaining the grid depends on...wait for it...transportation! And getting coal out of the ground and to the electric plant depends on--transportation! And operating drilling rigs that find new gas reserves depends on--transportation! Just saying.
projections
Looking at your chart, it sure seems like there is a big ramp up in 2010-2012 in fields yet to be developed. I wonder if there is some basis for that.
One way to measure the accuracy of the projection would be to look at what was projected in, say, 2006 for the 2010-2012 period, then compare it with the latest projection. If the new projection is substantially higher than what was projected, there has to be an explanation - say a major new oil field was found. Absent an explanation, one suspects skullduggery.
Biased reporting?
There certainly is a feeling in some camps, that IEA and other energy watchdogs are compromised/biased. But it is hard to find out the truth. The feeling at the oil drum was that they simply projected demand, and assumed that supply would rise to meet it. If you think about it, prior to peak oil, that would probably be an adequate method for making predictions. Post peak, you can probably do the opposite, project supply, and assume there will be enough demand to use it all. We are probably in the middle part of that transition now, and simplistic logic that applies to either asymptote won't work.
But, I can think of several reasons why pressure to err on the optimistic side may come from:
(1) The (short term) concern that signalling a potential supply problem will trigger a speculative bubble/price spike. This in itself would be harmful. A lot of peakoil types have been attacked as enablers for speculative price rises.
(2) It is probably in the interest of the producers, that the world doesn't adequately prepare, because then their resources will be very valuable.
(3) Issues like sustainability and what sort of energy we consume have become partisan issues. Conservatives tout claims that supply is enough for many decades to come. Sustainabilty seems to be a liberal cause -not a conservative one. I think this has partly to do with the matter that the recognition of sustainability issues could trigger greater regulations, and that possibility is more feared on the right than the potential chaos that would result should we run into a serious supply crisis. And once an issue gets embedded into partisanship, it becomes part of the identity of the various groups, so admitting the other side may have a point is tantamont to treason.
The real danger, is that because of the preponderence of optimistic claims, that we won't take the steps needed to prepare for the possibility of a supply crunch cum price spike. Quite a few people, including myself think it highly likely that our recovery from the economic crisis will be cut short by a large oil and commodities price spike. And rather than look at our consumption as the issue (and changes to it the most effective coping strategy), the witch hunt for scapecoats could get nasty.
Anybody know what
Anybody know what "non-conventional oil" is?
New Release: IEA's 2009 World Energy Outlook
I believe page 6 is what you're looking for, tho it's pretty much the same as last year: 105 mb/d in 2030 -- http://www.iea.org/speech/2009/Tanaka/WEO2009_Press_Conference.pdf (All the deets here: http://www.iea.org/index_info.asp?id=854)
Missing a key date in the post - 121MBPD *in 2030*
Hey Kevin,
Your first paragraph is missing a key date and it's very confusing. It should read " In 2004 they projected that IN 2030 the world would produce 121 million barrels per day of crude oil. (words in caps added) Without that, the post, especially with the chart, is very confusing and implies that today world production is falling 5%/year.
Dollared
Non-conventional oil is
Non-conventional oil is stuff like tar sands and oil from shale. It's expensive and very environmentally damaging to extract.
Unconventional fuels.
David: I looked it up on wikepedia, and it says essentially what I expected. Conventional oil is poking a hole in the ground and pumping out oil. Their definition requires different extraction and treatment methods this includes:
(1) Tar sands. Mostly mined and processes.
(2) Oil shale. Generally (at least for the western US oil shales) this doesn't contain oil, but keragen, which is a precursor to oil. Had these formations been buried deeper the keragen would have been baked into oil and natural gas. In order to utilize this stuff we gotta supply our own energy to do what nature failed to do for us.
(3) Coal to liquids.
(4) Biofuels, including algae based methods.
(5) Gas to liquid. Natural gas can be processed into liquid fuel.
All of these methods are going to be pretty expensive. Some of them may require so much energy input, that the energy content of the produced oil may not be enough to justify extraction. The real issue is not the theoretical oil in the ground, which is what people report when they claim we have trillions of barrels left, but how much can b extracted at reasonable cost. Much of these supposed reserves would take more energy to produce than is contained in the oil.
There is also a thing called natural gas liquids, which wikipedia didn't mention. This is stuff that comes out of oil wells in gaseous form, but can be condensed. Stuff like Butane (lighter fluid) and propane. Natural gas liquids are usually included in the quoted figures for worldwide oil production.
oil projections...
If you are looking for an up-to-date chart of how different estimates compare...
please find the charts here: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5521
As you can see both the IEA as well as the EIA are *much* more optimistic than all the other outlooks displayed here. Not all of them are peak oil doomers either.
http://theoildrum.com is one hell of a resource, I hope you'll check it out. This is too important not to.