Thank's publishing the interview! I'm really pleased to see a senior director of one of the big non-national oil companies that gets it, that climate change and peak oil are completely entwined and at a crisis level in the world. Bob Ebersole

I found the comment ...

the new business, which is managing CO2.

Q: So having let the genie out of the bottle the oil companies will be paid to put it back in again?

A: I think that’s right. I think that’s how they’ll make a living.

... extreeemly interesting. The UK is being "softened up" for carbon taxes, and this suggests that the government will act as a clearinghouse to pass this revenue onto the Oilcos. Whether CCS actually works or not is another matter, but anything's better than an economy powered by renewables, I guess. That's the sarcanol speaking.

A: It depends on how fast conventional oil continues to decline.
(^Partial response to a question.)

Hmm, the cat is officially out of the bag now?

I may be wrong, but isn't the reason the oil price has been going up is because demand has been outstripping supply for the last 3 years or so?

http://science.reddit.com/info/2q4gt/comments

if you are so inclined...

Of course if you don’t care about climate change then you just burn coal. If you do care about climate change, you have certainly to embrace biofuels and if you’re going to burn coal you have to burn it cleanly.

And when you embrace biofuels to mitigate climate change you mitigate world population increase. Talk about win win, at least for some.

I think we can look fforward to a so-called second generation of biofuels made from agricultural waste products, or byproducts as they are more properly called, such as straw.

Hey, why not eliminate the straw and just burn dirt...oh yes first they burn the straw which starves the soil and turns it into dirt and then they burn the dirt. Wow! Another win win situation!

Thanks, Chris!

I agree with Lord Oxburgh as shown in the forecast below. I think that production has hit plateau now and that oil prices could reach $150/barrel by end of 2010. Demand could outstrip supply in the next few months.

click to enlarge, updated for 0.5 mbd OPEC quota increase and for IEA Sep 2007 OMR. For a full forecast please click here

However, in an interview with Barron's today
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB118981092541828147.html?mod=9_0031_b...
Rothman of ISI group
http://www.isigrp.com/corp/dec2005/miker.jsp
thinks that oil prices will go to $US45/barrel. I don't think so...

As I was skimming the article, i came across the double-do-not touch barrier of 'alt-energy will be price competitive at $150/bbl'

I stopped reading after that... he has been dumped into the idiot/agenda file

I will be attending a speech tomorrow by John Hofmeister, President of Shell (USA) Oil Company.

Any idea how Lord Ron Oxburgh differs from the current Shell position ?

Any suggestions for questions ?

Thanks,

Alan

One writer noted that: "With a
global population that has
quadrupled in the last 100 years
(Al Gore) I see no solution other
than an abrupt decrease in the
population of mankind."

The U.S., Canada and Britain are
using 7-10 times the
amount of resources of the average
person in the 3rd world. This
amounts to the equivalent of
3 billion people if you multiply
400 million by 7. If we refrain from
using the simplistic
argument that the world has to
reduce its population, it would
make more sense to specify the
population that most abuses the
earth's resources. If the developed world
could radically reduce the profligate
amount of resources it is using then
we will do a great deal to salvage
a future for the coming generations. Alternatively if the developed world
could halve their population then the
next generation might have a future..
worth having.

Considering that most of the large oil field have been in production for decades, oil can only be extracted at some maximum rate and world demand is increasing, it is not hard to project that world demand will exceed world supply on a daily basis soon.