ASPO 6. In Praise of

Ray Leonard of the Kuwait Energy Company was the speaker who, for me, stole the show. He offered, prefaced with a few caveats, insights from within the oil industry, setting out how what the oil industry tells the public and what it actually thinks are very different. One got a sense from listening to Leonard of the degree of profound unease behind closed oil company doors, as year after year they have to downsize their declared reserves and find themselves less and less able to be optimistic.


A clear and accomplished speaker, he spoke of a conference last year called the Hedberg conference where an invited audience from oil companies and bodies like the USGS and the EIA all, in confidence and with no press presence, exchanged their best data, coming up with far more sobering data than had previously been made public. These kind of