George Monbiot gets it wrong - again!

No, George - the facts have not changed but you have got it wrong yet again.

To give a bit of background ion 2008 George went off to Paris to interview Fatih Birol of the IEA and was shocked to learn that conventional oil would peak much earlier than had been admitted.

Since then there were interviews given by Fatih Birol saying that conventional oil production has already peaked, probably in 2007. I was expecting George to pick up this new information but there was nothing; I even tried contacting him at the time but got nothing back.

What I discovered about the politics of the IEA was very interesting so will repost that article along with the Fatih Birol interview on Radio New Zealand.

Last year, after the catastrophe in Fukushima George decided to embrace nuclear power and now (much like James Lovelock earlier this year with global warming) George is choosing this time (or all times) to deny Peak Oil.

All this indicates to me that George didn't really understand Peak Oil and certainly does not understand economics.

To do him justice these are confusing (and interesting) times and he is probably correct that if we take into account non-conventional 'oil' such as shale or tar sands there is still enough to cook the planet. 


I have learned not to underestimate the insane and suicidal greed of 'our' elite.


I still suggest that George Monbiot has that conversation with Fatih Birol that he should have had last year

We were wrong on peak oil. There's enough to fry us all

A boom in oil production has made a mockery of our predictions. Good news for capitalists – but a disaster for humanity

the Guardian,

2 July, 2012

The facts have changed, now we must change too. For the past 10 years an unlikely coalition of geologists, oil drillers, bankers, military strategists and environmentalists has been warning that peak oil – the decline of global supplies – is just around the corner. We had some strong reasons for doing so: production had slowed, the price had risen sharply, depletion was widespread and appeared to be escalating. The first of the great resource crunches seemed about to strike.

Among environmentalists it was never clear, even to ourselves, whether or not we wanted it to happen. It had the potential both to shock the world into economic transformation, averting future catastrophes, and to generate catastrophes of its own, including a shift into even more damaging technologies, such as biofuels and petrol made from coal. Even so, peak oil was a powerful lever. Governments, businesses and voters who seemed impervious to the moral case for cutting the use of fossil fuels might, we hoped, respond to the economic case.

Some of us made vague predictions, others were more specific. In all cases we were wrong. In 1975 MK Hubbert, a geoscientist working for Shell who had correctly predicted the decline in US oil production, suggested that global supplies could peak in 1995. In 1997 the petroleum geologist Colin Campbell estimated that it would happen before 2010. In 2003 the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes said he was "99% confident" that peak oil would occur in 2004. In 2004, the Texas tycoon T Boone Pickens predicted that "never again will we pump more than 82m barrels" per day of liquid fuels. (Average daily supply in May 2012 was 91m.) In 2005 the investment banker Matthew Simmons maintained that "Saudi Arabia … cannot materially grow its oil production". (Since then its output has risen from 9m barrels a day to 10m, and it has another 1.5m in spare capacity.)

Peak oil hasn't happened, and it's unlikely to happen for a very long time.

A report by the oil executive Leonardo Maugeri, published by Harvard University, provides compelling evidence that a new oil boom has begun. The constraints on oil supply over the past 10 years appear to have had more to do with money than geology. The low prices before 2003 had discouraged investors from developing difficult fields. The high prices of the past few years have changed that.

Maugeri's analysis of projects in 23 countries suggests that global oil supplies are likely to rise by a net 17m barrels per day (to 110m) by 2020. This, he says, is "the largest potential addition to the world's oil supply capacity since the 1980s". The investments required to make this boom happen depend on a long-term price of $70 a barrel – the current cost of Brent crude is $95. Money is now flooding into new oil: a trillion dollars has been spent in the past two years; a record $600bn is lined up for 2012.

The country in which production is likely to rise most is Iraq, into which multinational companies are now sinking their money, and their claws. But the bigger surprise is that the other great boom is likely to happen in the US. Hubbert's peak, the famous bell-shaped graph depicting the rise and fall of American oil, is set to become Hubbert's Rollercoaster.

Investment there will concentrate on unconventional oil, especially shale oil (which, confusingly, is not the same as oil shale). Shale oil is high-quality crude trapped in rocks through which it doesn't flow naturally.

There are, we now know, monstrous deposits in the United States: one estimate suggests that the Bakken shales in North Dakota contain almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia (though less of it is extractable). And this is one of 20 such formations in the US. Extracting shale oil requires horizontal drilling and fracking: a combination of high prices and technological refinements has made them economically viable. Already production in North Dakota has risen from 100,000 barrels a day in 2005 to 550,000 in January.

So this is where we are. The automatic correction – resource depletion destroying the machine that was driving it – that many environmentalists foresaw is not going to happen. The problem we face is not that there is too little oil, but that there is too much.

We have confused threats to the living planet with threats to industrial civilisation. They are not, in the first instance, the same thing. Industry and consumer capitalism, powered by abundant oil supplies, are more resilient than many of the natural systems they threaten. The great profusion of life in the past – fossilised in the form of flammable carbon – now jeopardises the great profusion of life in the present.

There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us, and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground. Twenty years of efforts to prevent climate breakdown through moral persuasion have failed, with the collapse of the multilateral process at Rio de Janeiro last month. The world's most powerful nation is again becoming an oil state, and if the political transformation of its northern neighbour is anything to go by, the results will not be pretty.

Humanity seems to be like the girl in Guillermo del Toro's masterpiece Pan's Labyrinth: she knows that if she eats the exquisite feast laid out in front of her, she too will be consumed, but she cannot help herself. I don't like raising problems when I cannot see a solution. But right now I'm not sure how I can look my children in the eyes.

Twitter: @georgemonbiot

The IEA changes its mind on Peak Oil

Seemorerocks, 30 May 2011

This week’s interview of the International Energy Agency’s chief economist Dr. Fatih Birol on National radio has had a profound effect on me. Not only was he giving official confirmation of what we have known for some years now - namely, that world crude oil production has already peaked, about five years ago, but the interview raised about as many questions as it answered.

Foremost amongst these was: why was Dr. Birol making such a stark statement, albeit buried in lots of statements that seemed to be more face-saving self-justification than fact through the antipodean media? (the ABC and Radio New Zealand).

When I looked on the internet I could not find any other references to this in the international media except for an article by George Monbiot who was content to merely refer to the ABC interview. I further checked by sending an email to John Vidal, environmental editor of the Guardian and he wrote back to me: “(It) has been mentioned but we haven't interviewed Fatih directly yet.

We need ‘four Saudi Arabias’ to make up the shortfall. I knew I had heard this before so I checked. Mike Ruppert said so in the movie Collapse, quoting the late Matt Simmons who had in fact said “three Saudi Arabias”. Then he said “we are the first ones” to make a proper study of oil reserves; I knew that this work had been done years before by people like Colin Campbell, Matt Simmons and many others.

The language reminded me of Brezhnev-era reports that euphemistically warned of “shortcomings”in the Soviet economy just a few short years before collapse.

Something just didn’t add up. Rather than rest with my indignation I decided to check a few things up.

AGENCY CHANGES ITS MIND IN 2008

Back in 2005 the executive director of the IEA Claude Mandil dismissed Peak Oilers as “doomsayers”. He wrote: "The IEA has long maintained that none of this is a cause for concern. Hydrocarbon resources around the world are abundant and will easily fuel the world through its transition to a sustainable energy future."

The 2007 the IEA’s World Energy Outlook (WEO) report stated: “World oil resources are judged to be sufficient to meet the projected growth in in demand to 2030” and predicted a rate of decline in output from the world's existing oilfields of 3.7% a year. This, it said, presented a short-term challenge, with the possibility of a temporary supply crunch in 2015, but with sufficient investment any shortfall could be covered.

Yet, just a year later, at the end of 2008 the Agency was acknowledging Peak Oil and projecting a peak in 2020. and a projected rate of decline of 6.7%. On the basis of this new report environmentalist George Monbiot who writes for the Guardian went to Paris to interview Dr. Birol and there is an excellent video with excerts from this interview.You can see the consternation Monbiot - he has to repeat his question several times.

In his account Monbiot writes:

“So the IEA had better be right. In the report on peak oil commissioned by the US department of energy, the oil analyst Robert L Hirsch concluded that "without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs" of world oil supplies peaking "will be unprecedented". He went on to explain what "timely mitigation" meant. Even a worldwide emergency response "10 years before world oil peaking", he wrote, would leave "a liquid-fuels shortfall roughly a decade after the time that oil would have peaked". To avoid global economic collapse, we need to begin "a mitigation crash programme 20 years before peaking". If Hirsch is right, and if oil supplies peak before 2028, we're in deep doodah”

Well, in 2011 it does seem not only that Robert Hirsch is right but that we have already peaked. If the earlier predictions place us in deep doodah where does the new reality place us?

THE BACKGROUND

It turned out that there was a real story behind all of this. I found an article from the Ecologist of last year which explained how a young 22-year old politics student Lionel Badal uncovered fraud at the IEA. This was also covered by an earlier article in the Guardian “Key oil figures distorted by US pressure says whistleblower” (5) I then found an account of the whole thing written by Claude Badal himself. (6)

It appears that members of the Agency working on the 1998 WEO made a detailed assessment of future oil production and reached the conclusion: that oil production would peak well before 2020, around 2014.

The members of this team were Jean-Marie Bourdaire, Ken Wigley, Keith Miller and Fatih Birol.

Right from the start the team was under intense pressure and scrutiny so had to cloak their findings in some sort of code:

“A structural problem with oil as identified by the IEA team would undeniably question the sustainability of the current economic model. During the study, the IEA team realised the extent to which economic growth was correlated to the availability of abundant and cheap energy. Hence, once oil production would stop to grow and tensions appear, economic growth would become far more difficult to sustain, if not impossible. The IEA team was effectively walking on eggshells” (7)

So much so that one journalist David Fleming talked of a meeting with Fatih Birol in 1999 held in secret in a neutral location. Apparently he even looked over his shoulder before talking.

They decided that they had to use coded language - they could not just blurt it out and say ‘We are looking at a big, permanent oil deficit, for which we can offer no solutions'.

In an open letter the Guardian Colin Campbell explained the background. (8)

In order to soften the message the team decided to add a ‘balancing item” called “unidentified conventional oil” that would suddenly appear, enough to cancel the shortages. This “balancing item” was a code for shortages. It seems that pressure was brought to bear from the United States who had a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that oil was plentiful, and whose EIA reached the conclusion (without the detailed analysis of figures) that:

“ Oil prices are expected to remain relatively low, and resources are not expected to constrain substantial increases in oil demand through 2020... In 2020, world oil consumption is projected to exceed 115 million barrels per day....there is now widespread agreement that resources are not a key constraint in satisfying increases in world oil demand to 2020.”

It transpires that by revealing, albeit in code, the real situation the authors of the 1999 World Energy Outlook had got into trouble and intense pressure was put on the IEA by elements of the US administration: Bourdaire, would have to leave the Agency while Wigley retired and Miller also left the IEA. The sole person from this team left was Dr. Fatih Birol who would go on to become the Agency’s chief economist.(9)

It seems that he may have learned from this experience; the 2000 WEO, which he designed and managed suppressed any warning of a coming oil crunch. “The (2000) Outlook views the world oil-resource base as adequate to meet demand over the projection period... One need expect no global ‘supply crunch'.”

For almost a decade, until 2008 any findings that indicated that there was a problem with oil production or that discoveries were lower than expected were suppressed or ignored.

It seems amazing looking back now that the IEA could have told its member states in 2004 that oil prices were “assumed to remain flat until 2010, and then to begin to climb steadily to $29 in 2030 (sic)”.

The International Energy Agency was set up after the oil shocks of the 70’s to help prevent another oil shock and to provide a counterbalance to OPEC. It has provided annual World Energy Outlooks for its member states that would help countries develop their energy policies. Basically the IEA was supposed to be a trustworthy and authoritative source of information.

Because of pressures from the US administration governments and businesses from member states were basically misled until 2008 that oil prices would remain low - key years in which countries could have made decisions to develop renewable energy sources but didn’t because these energies were made to look uncompetitive compared to oil.

CONCLUSION

To me this statement by Dr. Birol that conventional oil has already peaked is of huge significance even if it is only confirming something that people in the Peak Oil movement have already known for some time. It seems incredible that this information from an Agency that has such importance for world governments should be largely ignored. It seems that nobody wants to look at the true implications of this.

To quote George Monbiot again:

“To avoid global economic collapse, we need to begin "a mitigation crash programme 20 years before peaking". If Hirsch is right, and if oil supplies peak before 2028, we're in deep doodah”

Well, in 2011 it does seem not only that Robert Hirsch is right but that we have already peaked. If the earlier predictions place us in deep doodah where does the new reality place us?