It's quite astonishing, really, how much store we place in the International Energy Agency's predictions for oil supply, when they are no better than educated guesses. In an interview with George Monbiot in December last year, IEA chief economist
In terms of non-Opec [countries outside the big oil producers' cartel]," he replied, "we are expecting that in three, four years' time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. In terms of the global picture, assuming that Opec will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is, of course, not good news from a global-oil-supply point of view.
So, as Monbiot points out, we have eleven years - at best - before world supply plateaus. Of course, there are other industry analysts who are strongly convinced that we are already there. And given that Opec and even the IEA itself have an interest in downplaying looming shortages, we may indeed have only 3 to 4 years before the economy starts to hurt badly. Which is not enough time to prepare. 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.
Despite the IEA's acknowledgements to Monbiot last year, new revelations suggest the organisation is still overstating oil supplies.
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