- World oil and gas supplies are heading for a "production
crunch" sometime between 2010 and 2020 when they cannot meet supply,
because global reserves are 80 per cent smaller than had been thought,
new forecasts suggest.
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- Research presented this week at the University of Uppsala
in Sweden claims that oil supplies will peak soon after 2010, and gas supplies
not long afterwards, making the price of petrol and other fuels rocket,
with potentially disastrous economic consequences unless people have moved
to alternatives to fossil fuels.
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- While forecasters have always known that such a date
lies ahead, they have previously put it around 2050, and estimated that
there would be time to shift energy use over to renewables and other non-
fossil sources.
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- But Kjell Aleklett, one of a team of geologists that
prepared the report, said earlier estimates that the world's entire reserve
amounts to 18,000 billion barrels of oil and gas - of which about 1,000
billion has been used up so far - were "completely unrealistic".
He, Anders Sivertsson and Colin Campbell told New Scientist magazine that
less than 3,500 billion barrels of oil and gas remained in total.
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- Dr James McKenzie, senior assistant on the climate change
programme at the World Resources Institute in Washington, said: "We
won't run out of oil - but what will happen is that production will decline,
and that's when all hell will break loose."
-
- Present annual oil consumption is about 25 billion barrels,
and shows no signs of slowing. That would suggest a "production crunch"
- where consumption grows to meet the maximum output - within the next
couple of decades.
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- Dr McKenzie said that on this topic the argument split
between economists and geologists. "The economists think it will just
force the price of oil up, which will mean it will become economic to extract
it from all sorts of unusual places, such as tarry sands or deposits which
are 90 per cent rock and 10 per cent oil. But the geologists say - you
tell us where the deposits are and we'll find them. We've looked and we
can't."
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- One side-effect of having lower oil reserves might be
that the worst predictions of climate change would be forestalled - because
there would be less fuel to burn, and therefore less carbon dioxide, the
greenhouse gas, produced.
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- The Uppsala team's estimates are lower than any considered
by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose minimum estiimate
for the total reserves was 5,000 billion barrels.
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- But Nebojsa Nakicenovic, an energy economist at the University
of Vienna in Austria, who headed the IPCC team that produced the reserves
forecasts, said the Swedish group were "conservative", and that
his team had taken into account a wider range of estimates. Dr Nakicenovic
added that, if oil and gas began to run out, "there's a huge amount
of coal underground that could be exploited".
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- Dr McKenzie said: "We have to accept the fact of
oil and gas production peaking, and get concerned with substitutes. It's
not when will we run out, it's when will production be unable to meet demand.
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- "And 97 or 98 per cent of transport depends on it.
You can use coal to make methanol to power your cars or buses. But the
reality is that it's all about where the oil is."
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- The Gulf countries - Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar,
Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates - produce about 25 per cent
of the world's oil at the moment, and hold 65 per cent of the world's oil
reserves.
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- "That's why we went to war in Iraq," said Dr
McKenzie. "Gas might have comparable reserves to oil, but it's not
in the right place and we don't really have the infrastructure to transport
it."
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- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=449053
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