”Accumulating risks” to world energy supply: US NPC

The world is not running out of crude oil and natural gas but there are “accumulating risks” to securing global supplies through 2030, a high-level board of U.S. oil company executives found in a report obtained by Reuters on Thursday.

Those risks include “political hurdles, infrastructure requirements and availability of trained work force,” according to the study by the U.S. National Petroleum Council, conducted at the behest of U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman.
The NPC, whose members include executives of big oil companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron Corp, will present the study at its July 18 meeting.

The group calls for “a new assessment of the global oil and natural gas endowment and resources to provide more current data for the continuing debate.”

Matt Simmons, founder of Houston-based Simmons and Co. International, who has argued that world oil production is declining irreversibly, criticized the report’s findings.

Simmons, a member of the council who provided input for the report, pointed to a graph showing oil production from existing reserves falling below 20 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2030 from current levels near 75 million bpd.

In that chart, the addition of output from known reserves, enhanced oil techniques, unconventional sources like Canada’s oil sands and “exploration potential” boosts the total to near 120 million bpd by 2030.

“We don’t have any idea where those reserves are going to come from or how we are going to get them out of the ground,” Simmons said. “The odds of this ever happening are zero.”

Reuters