Oil peak
Overblown assets
The world fell into a global financial crisis in 2007-8 because the banking sector got its asset assessment wrong, systemically and dangerously. Peak oil can be thought of as the risk that the oil and gas industry is in the process of doing the same: systemically, and even more dangerously then the bankers did. The peak of oil production is far in the future, according to most of the oil industry. The UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES) are among those who think it is just a few years off. We released our first report at the Stock Exchange in November 2008. This You-Tube clip, featuring taskforce members plus Richard Branson, gives a flavour.
- Read the ITPOES Peak Oil Report
Energy crisis or energy famine?
One of biggest concerns the UK taskforce has is that if the premature peak-oil analysis is correct, it has been teed up by a dysfunctional industry-wide culture, and at the point at which that realisation dawns widely across the industry, oil-producing countries will start to hold back oil supplies for use in their multi-hundred-billion-dollar domestic infrastructure programmes. This will mean that the peak of global production might be experienced by some oil importing countries not as a global energy crisis, but as an energy famine. This makes emergency proactive action all the more imperative.
Temporary energy crisis, as happened before in 1973 and 1978, is one thing. Permanent energy famine would be quite another.
What do the footsoldiers of the oil industry think?
The October 2009 issue of Petroleum Review published extracts of an Oxford Union-style debate between a former Chief Geologist at BP, arguing that peak oil is “no longer a problem,” and myself, arguing that it is very much a problem. After the debate, an audience of several hundred industry geologists voted. For the outcome, and an analysis by the chairman - a Channel 4 News producer - check here. A good account of the debate is available on an industry website here.
Next in the campaign
The ITPOES taskforce is continuing its work in 2009. We have tried to engage the UK government, but with little success. They prefer to believe the BP/Shell/Exxon story about oil supply. Our second report will be published in the first week of February.
