Dr. Kontorovich, Russian Academy of Science, Peak Oil in “in 2020 and not later than 2030”

When one examines the programme for the World Petroleum Congress in Qatar, December 5-7, one can see that there are seven plenary sessions and the last of these has the theme “Peak Oil: Ahead of Us or Behind Us?”. The managing director of the French oil company Total, Christophe de Margarie, is the main speaker and it will be exciting to see what he has to say.

However, Peak Oil was already a topic of discussion yesterday at a round table discussion titled, ”Peak Oil: Reality or Mirage?” The online oil news site Upstreamonline.com headlined its daily news with, “ExxonMobil: ‘Technology to beat Peak Oil’’’. This was because Marco Rasi, vice president of Asia Pacific at ExxonMobil Development had made the following statement during the discussion,
“We don’t need to discover a lot of new resources if we continue to push forward with new technology and make it possible to economically produce resources that we already know about,”. He added, “Many of the assumptions that underlie peak oil theory…are really unfounded, because they do not take into account the role of technology. Technology makes it easier, and therefore more economically viable, to find hydrocarbons.”

This optimistic attitude towards Peak Oil was not shared by Alexey Kontorovich, Academician and Chairman of the Presidium of Kemorovo Scientific Center, Russian Academy of Science. He thought it possible that oil production would reach a maximum in 2020 and not later than 2030. It was also interesting that he gave an estimated oil production in year 2100 of between 4.2 and 4.5 billion barrels per year. That should be compare with current production of 30 billion barrels per year.

Of course, it would have been interesting if I had been invited to participate in the discussion on Peak Oil but it was gratifying nevertheless that Peak Oil is now on the agenda of the large oil companies.

aleklet