Peak oil ”wrong,” says Schwartz

“The peak oil people simply don’t know what they’re talking about,” said environmental futurist Peter Schwartz today at the Cleantech Forum in Washington, D.C.

Forget everything you’ve heard about peak oil as a driver of clean technology, said futurist Peter Schwartz today in a provocative closing session at the Cleantech Forum XVIII in Washington D.C.
From 1982 to 1986, Schwartz headed scenario planning for the Royal
Dutch/Shell group of companies.

“We don’t know how much is out there,” he said today. “And they tend to be very conservative, these estimates. And technology changes, and that opens up new reserves deep offshore. When I was at Shell, we could only drill into a thousand feet of water. Today, they’re drilling into 10,000 feet of water, and 20,000 feet below that.”

Peak oil proponents point out that no meaningfully-sized new reserves have been discovered in years, that the oil that is known is relatively finite, and believe it will become too expensive and resource-intensive to produce meaningful amounts of petrochemical products from other known sources of oil like the Canadian tar sands.

“We are not going to run out of oil before the issue of climate change drives change. It’ll be costly oil. But it’ll be climate change catastrophes [such as sudden, unexpected displacement of large numbers of people, and massive property damage], and more expensive oil, not the fact that we’re running out of oil, that will drive change,” according to Schwartz.

Cleantech