Oilmen in troubled waters

For a bearer of bad news, the Opec conference is less of a lion’s den than it was. But some of the speakers still have strong ostrich tendencies.

…The usual stump speech these days: a global energy crisis is imminent; peak oil is real; your industry is in denial; the renewable – and demand-management industries, with our “survival technologies” -will be unable to fill the gap come the crisis. This is because, I say, you have held us back throughout all the years of the great addiction. But there could a silver lining to the cloud: maybe, just maybe, the exigencies of dealing with the global energy crisis will give the survival technologies the boost they need if we are to head off the worst excesses of climate change – as long as we are not stupid enough to resort en masse to coal and tar sands.

Talking like this to the oil industry is not the lion’s-den experience it was a few years ago. They do their best, but their resistance is somehow half-hearted. The first questioner, for instance, refers me to the Club of Rome, whose doomy predictions of resource depletion and environmental degradation proved wrong in the last century. My argument reminds him of that episode. If that gets you to sleep at night these days, sir, I’m happy for you. But it doesn’t work for me, or for many, many, like me. And some of us are in boardrooms.

Another says we shouldn’t think world oil will necessarily deplete as fast as the “lower 48″ US states did after their production peak. Enhanced-recovery technology is better now. Fine. I hope you’re right. But I don’t buy it. Most of the enhanced-production technologies were invented in the US, and thrown at declining domestic production after the peak of production in 1970. It has made little or no difference to plunging supply.

Next up is the man from Shell. The renewable resource is vast, he says: easily enough for 10 billion people even at current European per-capita energy demand. We have plenty of scope for renewable energy. We can make it economic. We have to. Climate change, unmitigated, will put an end to civilisation as we know it. But Shell’s first efforts to access the renewable riches come over as distinctly half-hearted.

The Guardian