Optimism, thy name is International Energy Agency

Had to use that excellent quote as the post title. This past week the IEA released its World Energy Outlook report (nearly 700 pages) and just prior to that some senior officials at the organization (one former and one current) blew the whistle on their overly optimistic oil reserve data.

The Globe and Mail article is quoted below, and the full article sums up the charade that the IEA is peddling.

..the WEO report did predict an assuring 105 million barrels a day of supply in 2030.

Total SA, the French oil giant that is pushing into the Alberta oil sands, doesn't buy the IEA's rosy scenario. Total works on the assumption that production will level off at 95 million barrels. Jim Buckee, the former chief executive officer of Canada's Talisman Energy, thinks the IEA prediction is nonsense. The U.K. Energy Research Centre last month said global production of conventional oil could go into terminal decline before 2020. Energy consultant Sadad al Husseini, the former exploration and production chief of Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil company, said in a presentation this month: "Oil supplies have reached a capacity plateau and will not meet a growth in demand over the next decade."

There are more skeptics. Kjell Aleklett, professor of physics at Sweden's Uppsala University and president of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, this week released a study entitled "The Peak of the Oil Age," which concluded that the WEO's production forecast is "unrealistic."

Kjell Aleklett:

“ Even if the oil exists, it is questionable whether the necessary investment needed to produce such a rapid pace of development can be achieved in timely fashion. ”
— Kjell Aleklett, professor at Sweden's Uppsala University

Aleklett has hit the nail on the head. Anti-peakists don't "get" the flow issue. There will always be oil in the ground. It's the flow rate that is the issue. We will not be able to keep up with soaring demand from recovering economies particularly from India and China.