The books Bill Clinton reads
Saturday, November 04, 2006
http://carbonsink.blogspot.com/2006/11/ ... reads.html
On June 17th 2006 Bill Clinton addressed the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. After the keynote speech there was a Q&A session. Clinton's answer to the last question was very revealing.
Question: Do you believe that the OPEC nations have exaggerated their oil reserves and if so, what are the implications?
Bill Clinton: Well first of all I’m not a petroleum geologist, but I can tell you this. If you read, there’s a book written by a man named Jeremy Leggett who is a petroleum geologist who was so alarmed by what was happening not only in climate change but oil depletion that he went to work for Greenpeace. That’s a pretty good leap. He’s written a book called
The Empty Tank, if you want one book that is not as dark as a book called
The Long Emergency which is much darker, but really deals with this and attempts to explain the complications of it, I recommend it to you.
Clinton continues: There’s a guy named
Matthew Simmons who is a petroleum investment adviser, he’s made a fortune and has been
a friend of the Bush family, who believes that we have passed peak oil production. And I don’t know if they're overstating their reserves but I know this, they have said, for example, the Saudis have said they could go up to 12 million barrels a day in production to try to moderate price, and it doesn’t appear to me that they have or can.
And keep in mind, most of the OPEC producers prefer oil higher than it was in my second term, but a little lower than this, because they know if it gets real high and stays there, even if we don’t impose gas taxes, America will get in gear and we won’t need as much anymore and the Europeans will do the same and others will do the same. And the Chinese and the Indians might figure out how to skip a step of economic development and not have to use as much energy going through from where they are now to where we are now, in the same… not get there the same way we did.
So I actually believe that most of these oil producers would like it if oil were just a little lower or at least didn’t go to $100 a barrel in five years and
everybody I know who knows anything about this business believes it’ll be $100 a barrel in five years or less. Now, the only evidence that we have, those of us who aren’t petroleum geologists, so the question you asked sir, is for example, in the biggest Saudi oil field which has about eight or ten percent of the world’s oil, but has been heavily drilled, they are now getting the more difficult to drill oil out by injecting sea water and filling the… the cavities and then pushing it all back up.
Some of that retrievable oil is now 90 percent sea water, 10 percent oil, which dramatically increases the cost of disaggregating it and implies that there may be less oil there than we thought.
We know that the depletion rate of the North Sea oil that the UK has, has accelerated more rapidly then anyone thought. Now the really important question is, what are the implications of this? Let’s say that the world reaches peak oil production, let’s say we haven’t done it yet, but we do sometime in this decade. That would mean that half of all the recoverable oil under planet earth has been sucked out. That’s what it means.
And the article goes on...