by Luis de Sousa
Thu Nov 12th, 2009 at 08:06:13 AM EST
This morning I woke up, went shaving and then jumped for a quick shower as usual; at 7 o'clock I tunned the radio from Radio France to the local news radio in time for the first morning program. One of the opening news-bits seemed to have been edited by one of my colleagues at TheOilDrum.
Yes, world oil production has been stagnant since 2004; it won't go much beyond the present 83 Mb/d; we are the peak; the IEA's predictions are just dreams. It was all there, in my mother language in my preferred news radio. And more than that, the news source was a “mole” right at the heart of the IEA.
Update [2009-11-10 12:33:54 by Luis de Sousa]: : Kjell Aleklett (ASPO's chairman) has posted a note on this Guardian piece (hat tip Starvid). Highlights at the end of this weblog.
Promoted by afew
This all comes from a piece published overnight by the Guardian newspaper, someone found the courage (or ran out of shame) and set his mouth on the whistle:
Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower.
The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.
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.
[…]
Now the "peak oil" theory is gaining support at the heart of the global energy establishment. "The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year," said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. "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.
[…]
I can't stop thinking about James Schlinsinger's speech at the ASPO conference at Cork in 2007. In it he said the peok oil movement could declare victory. Back then I didn't quite feel like it, but today, with such explicit whistling, it surely feels like it.
But what have we won? The expected economic turmoil is here, Stakeholders in general are still acting as if they were living in the XX century (of which the coming Copenhagen conference is a good example), the common man in the street is still driving to work everyday and thinking how he'll finance his next four-wheeled token of adaptation success. If this is victory it is a bitter one.
And this leads me to reflect once more on the question of where to go from here for this movement. The awareness phase seems over for all practical purposes. Fossil Fuels are no longer blindly regarded as limitless deity gifts. With the consequences of the end of the Oil Age upon us, it is perhaps time to focus on what sort of Society and Civilization can be built in the XXI century. This will inevitably lead to different views of the future and a possible dilution of the movement. But as long as the compass keeps pointing to facts and reality there is a purpose for the Peak Oil cause.
Here are a few highlights from Kjell Aleklett's blog; it contains quite a number of interesting “revelations”:
[...] At that opportunity, in November 2007, I had a number of private conversations with officers of the IEA. The revelations now reported in the Guardian were revealed to me then under the promise that I not name the source. I had earlier heard the same thing from another officer from Norway who, at the time he spoke of the pressure being applied by the USA, was working for the IEA. Since these anecdotes were not scientific evidence I never made use of the information other than as inspiration to continue our own research.
Earlier, following a suggestion by Colin Campbell, I had communicated to Sweden’s delegate at the IEA that Sweden should leave the IEA since it was deceiving the world and this would have serious consequences globally. I also asked how they could approve of something like the World Energy Outlook that was so in error. I had previously posted an analysis of World Outlook 2004 on ASPO’s homepage. In the discussion that followed it was revealed that the USA was applying pressure. The pressure was that the IEA should consider the prognoses that USA’s Energy Information Agency releases half a year earlier as guidelines for the IEA report. […]
One consequence of that which has now been revealed is that the emissions scenarios that the IPCC has advanced for calculating future carbon dioxide production from oil can never reflect reality. Before the round table conference in Paris I was also given the task by the OECD of writing another report, ”Reserve driven forecasts for oil, gas and coal and limits in carbon dioxide emissions”. In connection with the Global Transport Forum in Leipzig in 2008 I met the chairperson for the IPCC, Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, and gave him a copy of this report. The subsequent interest from the IPCC’s side can be described as absolutely zero.
