Oil Major CEO talks about ”the real problem of peak oil”

Christophe de Margerie, who is the head of exploration and production and the likely next CEO of Total, underlines a point that I have been making repeatedly: the oil majors are running out of opportunities where to invest. Their investment budgets are stable or slightly increasing, but in a context of skyrocketing prices for a number of items (rigs, for instance), they are not developing more fields than before. They are constrained by lack of resources, lack of people, and lack of access to the remaining reserves, which are mostly located in countries closed to them, and which do not seem in a hurry to invest themselves.

Whatever the reasons, we have the number two guy of one of the top oil companies saying explicitly that the production hypotheses that everybody uses for long term planning are bunk. will that be enough for people to notice? When are the people at Boeing and Airbus, the car makers, the power companies, the civil works and construction companies, etc… – and the people that finance them over 20-30 years start noticing that the long term hypotheses are more and more absurd?

Energy Bulletin