[Pops]

Executive Summary
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he global energy map is changing, with potentially far-reaching consequences for energy
markets and trade. It is being redrawn by the resurgence in oil and gas production in the
United States and could be further reshaped by a retreat from nuclear power in some
countries, continued rapid growth in the use of wind and solar technologies and by the
global spread of unconventional gas production. Perspectives for international oil markets
hinge on Iraq’s success in revitalising its oil sector. If new policy initiatives are broadened and
implemented in a concerted effort to improve global energy efficiency, this could likewise be
a game-changer. On the basis of global scenarios and multiple case studies, this World Energy
Outlook assesses how these new developments might affect global energy and climate
trends over the coming decades. It examines their impact on the critical challenges facing
the energy system: to meet the world’s ever-growing energy needs, led by rising incomes and
populations in emerging economies; to provide energy access to the world’s poorest; and to
bring the world towards meeting its climate change objectives.

Taking all new developments and policies into account, the world is still failing to put the
global energy system onto a more sustainable path. Global energy demand grows by more
than one-third over the period to 2035 in the New Policies Scenario (our central scenario),
with China, India and the Middle East accounting for 60% of the increase. Energy demand
barely rises in OECD countries, although there is a pronounced shift away from oil, coal (and,
in some countries, nuclear) towards natural gas and renewables. Despite the growth in low-
carbon sources of energy, fossil fuels remain dominant in the global energy mix, supported
by subsidies that amounted to $523 billion in 2011, up almost 30% on 2010 and six times
more than subsidies to renewables. The cost of fossil-fuel subsidies has been driven up by
higher oil prices; they remain most prevalent in the Middle East and North Africa, where
momentum towards their reform appears to have been lost. Emissions in the New Policies
Scenario correspond to a long-term average global temperature increase of 3.6 °C.

[sparky]

.
" (subsidies) remain most prevalent in the Middle East and North Africa, where
momentum towards their reform appears to have been lost."

Yehhh ,
when the food and fuel subsidies are removed from the poors of the poor countries , they revolt !
Tunisia , Egypt Libya and Syria have been trying to cut those very expensive subsidies
result .......the Arab revolution
Nigeria tried too , the resulting mass protests got the government to change its mind
India talked about it

[Pops]

Staniford points out that the forecast assumes no growth in KSA or Russia, only Iraq, maybe.

So it's fracking or nothing.

Ya place yer bets and take yer chances...

[Pops]

IEA Fact Sheets
h/t Leanan!

[Pops]

Some articles gathered up by Resilience.org

[Pops]

Here is a nice long article by Kjell Aleklett that appears to look beyond the headline.

An analysis of World Energy Outlook 2012 as preparation for an interview with Science

[Pops]

And another voice of reason added to the criticisim of the IEA report from Chris Nelder at SmartPlanent:

Will the U.S. overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer by 2020?
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')hat’s what every headline blared after the release of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook (IEA WEO) on November 12.

Ever eager to report an upbeat story on energy, energy journalists everywhere seized on that part of IEA’s forecast, while generally ignoring the caveats. Most of the increase in U.S. production is expected to come from additional “tight oil” production from shale formations like the Bakken in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford in Texas. But, as IEA’s chief economist Fatih Birol noted, “Light, tight oil resources are poorly known … If no new resources are discovered (after 2020) and plus, if the prices are not as high as today, then we may see Saudi Arabia coming back and being the first producer again.”

Further, IEA warned that in order to limit global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels — the generally accepted target to stabilize carbon emissions and avoid dangerous climate change — no more than one-third of the world’s remaining proven fossil fuel reserves can be burned, and massive global investments in energy efficiency and low-carbon energy technologies will be needed.

But why let dirty details like those get in the way of a good story? Tell us more about how we’ll beat Saudi Arabia and become energy self-sufficient by 2035! Let’s hear about North America becoming a net oil exporter by 2030! By all means, tell us how this report means that the “peak oil idea has gone up in flames!”

As always, I prefer to look at the data.

[dissident]

Light tight oil is some sort of joke. There is no such thing. The Bakken type leaked-reservoir plays are just not that large to give sustained 3+ million barrels per day. In this graph you also see no evidence of kerogen derived syncrude coming on stream (the "other unconventional" is token) even though all the chatter is about shale oil. So no serious shale oil production out to 2035. NGL is mythical production based on the mythical amounts of tight natural gas.

But the most ridiculous part of the graph is the bottom for crude oil. These clowns have production on an asymptote to 4+ million barrels per day by 2035. In fact it is already flat in 2035. In which dimension does any region ever experience such behaviour? It is obvious that the "fields yet to be found" production is simply contrived and has no correspondence to reality. There will be fields found, but there is no way they are going to magically appear around 2025 and replace half of the exiting production in 10 years. These discoveries should be happening today and into the future and they will replace only part of the old production levels since the system is finite and it is a fact that the US crude production is long past its all-time peak.

Taking out all this nonsense leaves about 4.5 million barrels per day of total production instead of 9. And that is assuming NGL make a significant contribution and at the same time that conventional production does not collapse, which is being too generous.

[davep]

Rosy Forecast of Cheap Oil Abundance, Economic Boom a Myth

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13629-age-of-cheap-oil-abundance-a-myth

An interesting article on the hogwash that was the IEA's latest World Energy Outlook and Maugeri's "We were wrong on peak oil" (he happens to be an ex-oil exec).

Some snippets:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he gist of all this is that "peak oil" is now nothing but an irrelevant meme, out of touch with the data and soundly disproven by the now self-evident abundance of cheap unconventional oil and gas.

Delving deeper into the available data shows that despite being capable of triggering dangerous global warming, we are already in the throes of a global energy transition for which the age of cheap oil is well and truly over. For most serious analysts, far from signifying a world running out of oil, "peak oil" refers simply to the point when, due to a combination of below-ground geological constraints and above-ground economic factors, oil becomes increasingly and irreversibly more difficult and expensive to produce.

That point is now. US Energy Information Administration (EIA) data confirms that despite the US producing a "total oil supply" of 10 million barrels per day, up by 2.1 mbd since January 2005, world crude oil production and lease condensate - conventional production - remains on the largely flat, undulating plateau it has been on since it stopped rising that very year at 74 million barrels per day (mbd). According to John Hofmeister, former president of Shell Oil, "flat production for the most part" over the last decade has dovetailed with annual decline rates for existing fields of about "4 to 5 million bpd." Combined with "constant growing demand" - particularly from China and emerging markets - he argues, this will underpin higher oil prices for the foreseeable future.

The IEA's "World Energy Outlook" actually corroborates this picture - but the devil is in the largely overlooked details. Firstly, the main reason US oil supply will overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia is because Saudi and Russian output is projected to decline, not rise as previously assumed. So while US output creeps up from 10 to 11 mbd in 2025, post-peak Saudi output will fall to 10.6 mbd and Russia to 9.5 mbd.

...Therefore, world conventional oil production is already on a fluctuating plateau, and we are now increasingly dependent on more expensive unconventional sources. The age of cheap oil abundance is over...

...With the IEA's research under such intense US political scrutiny and interference for 12 years, its findings should perhaps not always be taken at face value.

The same goes, even more so, for Maugeri's celebrated Harvard report. By any meaningful standard, this was hardly an independent analysis of oil industry data. Funded by two oil majors - Eni and British Petroleum (BP) - the report was not peer-reviewed and contained a litany of elementary errors. So egregious are these errors that Dr. Roger Bentley, an expert at the UK Energy Research Centre, told ex-BBC financial journalist David Strahan: "Mr Maugeri’s report misrepresents the decline rates established by major studies; it contains glaring mathematical errors. . . . I am astonished Harvard published it."...

[MrEnergyCzar]

Two things in the report that stood out to me.

1. The full quiet acknowledgement that conventional crude will continue it's decline and
2. The Bakken ramp up to 3mb/day? This must assume that tight oil wells don't peak and they can build thousands more each year and get the funding to do it. I talked about this in one of my recent Peak Oil News Videos:

http://youtu.be/uVobKbpdQDY

MrEnergyCzar

[dohboi]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... ate-change

World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns

If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will 'lose for ever' the chance to avoid dangerous climate change

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for ever", according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.

Anything built from now on that produces carbon will do so for decades, and this "lock-in" effect will be the single factor most likely to produce irreversible climate change, the world's foremost authority on energy economics has found. If this is not rapidly changed within the next five years, the results are likely to be disastrous.

"The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried – if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."

If the world is to stay below 2C of warming, which scientists regard as the limit of safety, then emissions must be held to no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the level is currently around 390ppm. But the world's existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that "carbon budget", according to the IEA's analysis, published on Wednesday. This gives an ever-narrowing gap in which to reform the global economy on to a low-carbon footing.

[Tanada]

I actually read a synopsis of a study the other day that stated when you take global dimming from aerosal's into account we are at 1.6C today, if anything interupts the constant stream of pollution then within 5 years we would be 1.6C warmer than 1950.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dohboi', '
')World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns

The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for ever"

[dohboi]

Good point, T.

And that's the median (or less). Aerosols are estimated to have a cooling of anywhere from .5 to 2 degrees C.

So we could see sudden warming up to 1.3 degrees, or up as far as 2.8 degrees if sulfate and and some other other sorts of pollution, which is nasty stuff in its own right for all sorts of reasons, doesn't continue.

Plant, as usual, is mostly wrong or misleading, but I try not to engage such obvious trolls.

[Timo]

Geoengineering, anyone?

I know there's another thread somewhere here, devoted to that topic, but i'll only reiterate my POV from over there that for the sake of planetary survival, we really have no choice but to go in that direction, FSA. Aerosols, while not a silver bullet that really solve anything, do have a mitigating effect on global temperatures. For that matter Mt Pinotubo produced a rather nice cooling effect across the planet with it went kaboom. I honestly hope that the reports and scientists are wrong about all of this, but i personally give them greater odds on being right. If five years is all we've got before never going back, then we should recognize that reducing carbon emmissions in planetary unison is a pipe dream, and shift gears big time to mitigating the catastrophic consequences that we, ourselves, have geoengineered. What's the worst that could happen? A) succeed at some level, partially, or fully; B) screw up an make things worse; or C) do nothing and fry anyway. B and C are practically the same thing, in my book.

I'm glad i don't have kids.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dohboi', '.').. trolls.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Timo', 'G')eoengineering, anyone?

I know there's another thread somewhere here, devoted to that topic, but i'll only reiterate my POV from over there that for the sake of planetary survival, we really have no choice but to go in that direction, FSA. Aerosols, while not a silver bullet that really solve anything, do have a mitigating effect on global temperatures. For that matter Mt Pinotubo produced a rather nice cooling effect across the planet with it went kaboom.

[Newfie]

One other point made by Steven Anderson in a recent lecture (I think?) was that most of this talk referencing a particular number, say 1C of heat rise is misleading. That is usually a global average, but since so much is covered by ocean, which has a great mitigating effect, the rise we terrestrials will see is likely to be quite a bit higher. Especially true in the deep continental structured, say Iowa or Siberia. Of course that is where our breadbaskets are, and since we specialize in mono-cultures, their food producing capacity is at great risk.

Plant, if we can try to keep a civil discourse, I would like to point out that while China is building plants, as you say, they are exporting goods to rest of the world, the US in particular. Thus if you look at the entire system, it is much more global than you seem to make it. There are likely some places that contribute little, say Mali, but they are the exception.

In the long run I suspect that it matters not. This is just a way of finding blame. Blame will be cold comfort in a starving world, especially if it takes down the global monetary system.