Saturday, December 8, 2007

Did an oil-company CEO just endorse peak-oil theory?

quote from a recent presentation by ConocoPhillips CEO Jim Mulva that I think is significant coming from an industry leader, given that is sounds a lot like a measured endorsement of peak-oil theory:
Talking a little bit about the supply challenge. This is a slide that's been prepared by International Energy Agency and it just shows if you take all of the oil production around the world today, say, 86 million barrels a day, the natural decline on average is about 8% a year."So, if we're going to stay with 86 million barrels a day, we've got to be out there adding 6 or 7 million just to stay flat. So the question is, where is that all going to come from when you see Saudi, Arabia saying they're going to go to 12 million to 12.5 million and maybe up to 15 million barrels a day? How is this going to happen? It's not so important just what I think or say, but I know we've been saying for the better part of nearly 12 months. Personally, I don't think we're going to see --- for three reasons, I don't think we're going to see the supply go over 100 million barrels a day. The reason for that is, where is it all going to come from?"Second, it's going to be from a climate change greenhouse gas emission? I'm not so sure that the world, even if you could get up to those levels, would allow us it be done. So we have -- Demand maybe going up, but it's going to be constrained by supply."

No comments: