Drumbeat: May 15, 2013

Oil Shockwaves From U.S. Shale Boom Seen by IEA Ousting OPEC The U.S. shale boom will send “shockwaves” through the global oil trade over the next five years, benefiting the nation’s refiners and displacing OPEC as the driver of supply growth, the IEA said. North America will provide 40 percent of new supplies to 2018 through the development of light, tight oil and oil sands, while the contribution from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will slip to 30 percent, according to the International Energy Agency. The IEA trimmed global fuel demand estimates for the next four years, and predicted that consumption in emerging economies may overtake developed nations this year. “The supply shock created by a surge in North American oil production will be as transformative to the market over the next five years as was the rise of Chinese demand over the last 15,” the Paris-based adviser to 28 oil-consuming nations said in its medium-term market report today. The IEA Says Peak Oil Is Dead. That’s Bad News for Climate Policy No one—aside maybe from survivalists who’d stocked up on MREs and assault rifles—was really looking forward to a peak-oil world. Read this 2007 GQ piece by Benjamin Kunkel—while we’re discussing topics from the mid-2000s—that imagines what a world without oil would really be like. Think uncomfortable and violent. Oil is in nearly every modern product we use, and it’s still what gets us from point A to point B—especially if you need to get from A to B in a plane. If we were really to see the global oil supply peak and decline sharply, even as demand continued to go up, well, apocalyptic might not be too large a word. And for several years in the middle of the last decade, as oil prices climbed past $100 a barrel and analysts were betting it would break $200, that scenario seemed entirely plausible. But there was an upside to peak oil. Crude oil was responsible for a significant chunk of global carbon emissions, second only to coal. Only the shock of being severed from the main fuel of modernity would be enough to make us get serious about tackling climate change and shifting to an economy powered by renewable energy and efficiency. We’d have to because we’d have no other choice, save a future that might look something like Mad Max. We’d lose oil but save the world. The World is Not Running Out of Oil – but Europe Is Contrary to popular belief, peak oil alarmists and Greenpeace propaganda, the world is still and will continue to be for at least a century, largely powered by oil. And not just for transport. An endless number of consumer goods depend on a steady supply of petroleum products for their manufacture. As Marin Katusa, chief energy investment strategist for Casey Research points out, “A country without oil simply cannot continue to expand or even be competitive on the world stage.” Katusa explains, most of Europe’s oil comes from the North Sea region. A source where production has dropped to less than half of what it was in 2002. Much of the rest of it comes from countries such as Libya, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, all countries threatened by political instability and social unrest. Europe could, of course, push development of its own potential oil resources. Or they could if the ludicrously inept EU Energy Road Map wasn’t studded with anti-fossil fuel pot holes and renewable energy cul-de sacs that are deterring investors. It Doesn't Matter If We Never Run Out of Oil: We Won't Want to Burn It Anymore Like whale oil in the 1860s, oil today has become uncompetitive -- even at low prices -- and that will only become truer with time. No, Really: We're Going to Keep Burning Oil—and Lots of It No matter how much we wish it were otherwise, the economics favor burning fossil fuels. Peak oil, climate change and pipeline geopolitics driving Syria conflict Syria's dash for gas has been spurred by its rapidly declining oil revenues, driven by the peak of its conventional oil production in 1996. Even before the war, the country's rate of oil production had plummeted by nearly half, from a peak of just under 610,000 barrels per day (bpd) to approximately 385,000 bpd in 2010. Since the war, production has dropped further still, once again by about half, as the rebels have taken control of key oil producing areas. Faced with dwindling profits from oil exports and a fiscal deficit, the government was forced to slash fuel subsidies in May 2008 - w...