37 comments on IEA boss denies and confirms peak oil in same breath
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"tight" sounds like weasel words, do you believe supply will increase or decline in absolute terms? If increasing then it's no big deal, perhaps it won't increase as fast as some would like but it doesn't affect the current growth paradigm. If on the other hand supplies decline in absolute terms the rules of the game change.
By dismissing peak oil by citing yet to be discovered oil and then saying the necessary exploration isn’t happening Mandil is suggesting absolute declines – that’s peak oil in my book.
A chance although increasing smaller exists for extensive discovery of new oil deposits and exploitation of those deposits. We have almost reached the point that we have to discover two ghawars worth of oil to grow oil production again. So oil production will peak because of above ground factors alone even if we have not used up 50% of our oil. Simply because we certainly have used up a significant amount of the oil thats easy to extract. We have probably reached and passed the point that we can increase production fast enough to keep the production rate from decreasing.
Peak production and the point at which we have used half the remaining oil reserves are related but not directly. The reason that production declines generally set in some time after 50% of the oil is extracted is both a technical and empirical observation at the field level that holds as you aggregate fields.
Our concern is the peak production rate. This is achieved when about 50% of the easily accessible oil is produced after this point the amount of remaining reserves which could easily be greater than 50% of the total only serve to provide a upper bound on how much oil is extracted.
Since we are fairly confident half of the easy oil or conventional oil has been or is close to being extracted then the concerns about above ground factors simply mean production will always be less than our prediction and in some cases a lot less i.e Iraq. As production continues to decline the chances of increasing it become remote in another year or two probably impossible no matter how much oil you believe is in the ground since too many fields will be in decline.
No - it's simply a descriptive term. Oil supply is not a yes-or-no question, and it's foolish to fixate exclusively on whether it will increase or decrease.
You're drawing a false line between "increases 0.01%" and "decreases 0.01%", saying that the former is "no big deal" but the latter means "the rules of the game change". That's simply nonsense - those two scenarios are effectively identical.
Oil supply is not a matter of "yes" or "no", it's a matter of how much. Like a vise being tightened, it's all a matter of degree.
He isn't saying that, though:
"Geological reserves remain abundant....The main problem for security of supply is that the world will be increasingly dependent on a shrinking number of countries. If, in addition, they cannot invest for various reasons...we go towards big problems."
He's saying the risk is that concentrating the (abundant) oil supplies in the hands of a few producers makes the supply more volatile, meaning that disruptions to the ability of only a small number of producers would then be enough to cause big problems.
He's not saying declines will happen. He's not even saying they may happen. He's just saying that concentrating the supply risks unspecified "big problems".
While you may interpret that phrase as meaning "peak oil", all that really tells us is about your personal biases. It's possible that by "big problems" he means "such slow growth that prices skyrocket and the world enters a lengthy recession." Indeed, based on some of his similar-sounding concerns a few years ago (saying KSA needed to increase production by 3mb/d or there'd be big problems; they didn't, and prices shot up), it seems likely that he is talking about prices, or is just prone to hyperbole.