…OR IS IT?

The one thing depleting faster than oil is the credibility of those measuring it; The challenge of feeding billions of people as fuel supplies fall is staggering. And yet leaders' heads remain stuck in the sand
George Monbiot, 16 November 2009 (UK Guardian)

"I don't know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into free fall: the credibility of the body that's meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world's oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA's forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible. The agency's assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Alan Greenspan's blandishments about the health of the financial markets.

"…But nothing the whistle-blowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had [with]…Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres [and] has been trying to reduce his dependency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar panels and a ground-sourced heat pump….But these innovations have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%…According to farm scientists at Cornell University, cultivating one hectare of maize in the United States requires 40 litres of petrol and 75 litres of diesel. The amazing productivity of modern farm labour has been purchased at the cost of a dependency on oil. Unless farmers can change the way it's grown, a permanent oil shock would price food out of the mouths of many of the world's people…"

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"…I've been bellyaching about the British government's refusal to make contingency plans for the possibility that oil might peak by 2020 for the past two years…The new World Energy Outlook published by the IEA last week expects the global demand for oil to rise from 85m barrels a day in 2008 to 105m in 2030. Oil production will rise to 103m barrels, it says, and biofuels will make up the shortfall. If we want the oil, it will materialise…Almost every year the agency has been forced to downgrade its forecast for the daily supply of oil in 2030: from 123m barrels in 2004, to 120m in 2005, 116m in 2007, 106m in 2008 and 103m this year…

"…[The Peak of the Oil Age from Uppsala University] anticipates that maximum global production of all kinds of oil in 2030 will be 76m barrels per day. Analysing the IEA's figures, it finds that to meet its forecasts for supply, the world's new and undiscovered oilfields would have to be developed at a rate "never before seen in history". As many of them are in politically or physically difficult places, and as capital is short, this looks impossible…"

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"…Last month the UK Energy Research Centre published a massive review [see UK SAYS EXPECT LESS OIL] of all the available evidence on global oil supplies. It found that the date of peak oil will be determined not by the total size of the global resource but by the rate at which it can be exploited. New discoveries would have to be implausibly large to make a significant difference: even if a field the size of all the oil reserves ever struck in the US were miraculously discovered, it would delay the date of peaking by only four years…[A] find like this doesn't seem very likely.

"Regional oil supplies have peaked when about one third of the total resource has been extracted…So the assumption in the IEA's new report, that oil production will hold steady…looks unsafe…[Over] two thirds of current crude oil production capacity may need to be replaced by 2030…It seems unlikely that we have it. The world economy is probably knackered, whatever we might do now. But at least we could save farming…[with a government-mandated move to electric farm equipment and/or new farm practices]…The challenge of feeding seven or eight billion people while oil supplies are falling is stupefying. It'll be even greater if governments keep pretending that it isn't going to happen…"