Congressional Briefing: Can Oil Production Meet Rising Demand?
Posted by Gail the Actuary on October 15, 2010 - 9:30am
On Thursday, October 7, the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) conducted a congressional briefing on challenges of the oil industry to keep pace with rising global demand, and the potential implications for oil prices, national security and the world economy.
The panelists included a combination of some people in Washington DC for the ASPO-USA meeting (Robert Hirsch, Tad Patzek, and Arthur Berman) and some people currently or recently involved with government offices (including Franklin Rusco, Director of Energy at the GAO, and Guy Caruso, Former Administrator of the EIA). I found it especially interesting that the latter two, especially Guy Caruso, were concerned about oil supply. As head of the EIA from 2002 to 2008, Guy Caruso did not seem to voice these concerns.
This video can be found at Can Oil Production Meet Rising Demand? An mp3 recording and copies of presentations can be found at the EESI site. Below the fold I show some of the slides and mention a few of the comments made by the presenters.
The overall theme of the presentations seemed to be that there are many types of risks that supply will be inadequate to meet demand--rising demand from emerging economies, inadequate investment, and oil that cannot be pulled out of the ground fast enough, even though the appearance is that there is plenty of oil available. The result is likely to be high prices leading to recession. Alternatives are not scaling up quickly enough to be likely to be very helpful for a very long time - 25 years according to Art Berman.
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