A 'Peak Oil' Prediction Surprise From the International Energy Agency (cnbc.com) 73
"The International Energy Agency's latest outlook signals that oil demand could keep growing through to the middle of the century," reports CNBC, "reflecting a sharp tonal shift from the world's energy watchdog and raising further questions about the future of fossil fuels."
In its flagship World Energy Outlook, the Paris-based agency on Wednesday laid out a scenario in which demand for oil climbs to 113 million barrels per day by 2050, up 13% from 2024 levels. The IEA had previously estimated a peak in global fossil fuel demand before the end of this decade and said that, in order to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, there should be no new investments in coal, oil and gas projects... The IEA's end-of-decade peak oil forecast kick-started a long-running war of words with OPEC, an influential group of oil exporting countries, which accused the IEA of fearmongering and risking the destabilization of the global economy.
The IEA's latest forecast of increasing oil demand was outlined in its "Current Policies Scenario" — one of a number of scenarios outlined by the IEA. This one assumes no new policies or regulations beyond those already in place. The CPS was dropped five years ago amid energy market turmoil during the coronavirus pandemic, and its reintroduction follows pressure from the Trump administration... Gregory Brew, an analyst at Eurasia Group's Energy, Climate and Resources team, said the IEA's retreat on peak oil demand signified "a major shift" from the group's position over the last five years. "The justifications offered for the shift include policy changes in the U.S., where slow EV penetration indicates robust oil [consumption], but is also tied to expected increases in petrochemical and aviation fuel in East and Southeast Asia," Brew told CNBC by email. "It's unlikely the agency is adjusting based on political pressure — though there has been some of that, with the Trump administration criticizing the group's supposed bias in favor of renewable energy — and the shift reflects a broader skepticism that oil demand is set to peak any time soon," he added...
Alongside its CPS, the IEA also laid out projections under its so-called "Stated Policies Scenario" (STEPS), which reflects the prevailing direction of travel for the global energy system. In this assumption, the IEA said it expects oil demand to peak at 102 million barrels per day around 2030, before gradually declining. Global electric car sales are much stronger under this scenario compared to the CPS. The IEA said its multiple scenarios explore a range of consequences from various policy choices and should not be considered forecasts.
Thanks to Slashdot reader magzteel for sharing the news.
The IEA's latest forecast of increasing oil demand was outlined in its "Current Policies Scenario" — one of a number of scenarios outlined by the IEA. This one assumes no new policies or regulations beyond those already in place. The CPS was dropped five years ago amid energy market turmoil during the coronavirus pandemic, and its reintroduction follows pressure from the Trump administration... Gregory Brew, an analyst at Eurasia Group's Energy, Climate and Resources team, said the IEA's retreat on peak oil demand signified "a major shift" from the group's position over the last five years. "The justifications offered for the shift include policy changes in the U.S., where slow EV penetration indicates robust oil [consumption], but is also tied to expected increases in petrochemical and aviation fuel in East and Southeast Asia," Brew told CNBC by email. "It's unlikely the agency is adjusting based on political pressure — though there has been some of that, with the Trump administration criticizing the group's supposed bias in favor of renewable energy — and the shift reflects a broader skepticism that oil demand is set to peak any time soon," he added...
Alongside its CPS, the IEA also laid out projections under its so-called "Stated Policies Scenario" (STEPS), which reflects the prevailing direction of travel for the global energy system. In this assumption, the IEA said it expects oil demand to peak at 102 million barrels per day around 2030, before gradually declining. Global electric car sales are much stronger under this scenario compared to the CPS. The IEA said its multiple scenarios explore a range of consequences from various policy choices and should not be considered forecasts.
Thanks to Slashdot reader magzteel for sharing the news.
But, but... (Score:1)
Wrong about Production, Too (Score:4, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Figure 1: What we propagandized to you for decades and hoped to influence public policy with.
Figure 2: How pants-shittingly wrong we were.
Common tactic (Score:5, Interesting)
Oil's been in the dumps for the oil companies since 2014 with only 1 year of higher prices just after the pandemic.
This is the same playbook, we're running out of oil, E&P is down, ... as a way to pump up oil prices.
The larger trend is that oil companies have been in a cost cutting mode since 1986.
It's a problem for the government because ~3 percent of the entire US working population is working directly for oil companies, and that multiple states have an outsized reliance on oil production as one of the largest employees (Oklahoma 15% of employment and 28% of stage GDP).
https://www.api.org/news-polic... [api.org].
https://energyinfrastructure.o... [energyinfrastructure.org].
Federal and state tax reliance (Score:2)
Oil production and consumption in the USA is a large source of tax revenue at the state and federal level.
The politicians campaign on conservation, reducing carbon pollution from burning oil/gasoline yet don't want to give up the tax revenue which comes at the production side and at the end consumer side.
Oklahoma - Severance tax (when the oil is pumped out of the well) - 7%. This is $1.8 billion USD or 8% of the state tax revenue (behind sales and personal income tax)
Oklahoma - Gasoline taxes when a consum
Re: (Score:2)
The IEA has good data for what's happened (history). They are notoriously bad when it comes to predictions, i.e. looking back at past predictions shows them to be wrong almost every time. So I'm not believing this one either. What happens, happens. The IEA can tell you really did happen after the fact.
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Every year these exact same people say we've passed peak oil. It can't be both.
We haven't, and it isn't.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada... [www.cbc.ca]
We haven't reached peak stupidity yet (Score:2)
How fast can we make things worse by burning more fossil fuel? The answer may surprise your children, but not your grandchildren who will be sadly too familiar with the mess we've created for them.
In related news: Bears as in a plague of bears. Not a simple and direct relationship, but they have certainly become a massive nuisance in Japan. New record for human deaths, apparently because the beech trees had a really bad year resulting in lots of extra hungry bears. However what surprised me the most was an
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The answer may surprise your children, but not your grandchildren who will be sadly too familiar with the mess we've created for them.
I'm not that interested in the alternative world they envision either. They can trade all their freedom for safety after we are done with ours.
Plastics and oils (Score:4, Informative)
Green energy requires oil based plastics and oil based chemicals. EVs require oil based plastics and oil based chemicals. Fuels are needed for extraction and transportation of raw materials such as lithium and cobalt. Fuels are needed to run the intricate Asian supply chains the low cost global economy depends on - itâ(TM)s all by ship. Improvements in EV technology arenâ(TM)t going to eliminate the dirtiest fuels from transportation. This explains why: https://youtu.be/w__a8EcM2jI?s... [youtu.be]
Re: Plastics and oils (Score:2)
Mood affiliate, much? Why not use hemp for a lot of packaging, bamboo, etc.? Is this really about your mood and desire to ruin someone else's mood with cherry-picked words? Is it so wrong to wonder if it's emotions all the way down? Is it impossible that rationality is just cherry-picked moods about things?
Is Trivialism so wrong?
Re: Plastics and oils (Score:1)
What about hemp?
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What about hemp?
Turns out people just wanted the kind you can smoke. After they (mostly) got that [wikipedia.org], they stopped caring so much about the other potential uses.
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That video is 4 years old and claims EV's are expensive and have poor range. Not the case at the present time.
>> EVs require oil based plastics and oil based chemicals
So what? Most oil is used as transportation fuel which is burned into the atmosphere, and EV's reduce the demand for that.
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I don't think OP was dissing EVs, just noting that they, like other things, also use petroleum product for things other than fuels and some things that use fuels can't be easily replaced with EVs.
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>> I don't think OP was dissing EVs
You must have not seen his video cite.
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Re: Plastics and oils (Score:2)
Imagine how much more plastic and other petrochemicals you'd have if we stoppes burning most of it.
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Green energy requires oil based plastics and oil based chemicals
Not really. Plastics require hydrocarbons that can be sourced from anything, including coal or wood. Oil is just the most convenient source, but it's certainly not the only one.
And anyway, only 6% of oil is used for plastic production. Even increasing the demand for plastics won't materially affect oil consumption. Fossil hydrocarbons are also used as a feedstock for other industrial processes (fertilizer production mainly), but adding up all these uses accounts for just about 15% of global production.
We will burn (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody will stop voluntarily. For all our intelligence and civilization, humans are exhibiting classic animal behavior that any ecologist or evolutionary biologist would instantly recognize. A species of animal will expand it’s range and utilization of resources until external circumstance force it to stop.
I’m not gonna judge or preach. But, let’s face the facts. This is what’s happening. On this score, we’re no different than a termite mound or a species of squirrel.
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We're like the photosynthetic microbes that caused the Oxygen Catastrophe.
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Going beyond "a termite mound or a species of squirrel", we are now at the level of pond scum.
Re: We will burn (Score:1)
Are they saying peak oil demand will occur before peak production? How come fertility is dropping below replacement? Did the stone age end because we ran out of stones?
Re: We will burn (Score:1)
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I’m not gonna judge or preach. But, let’s face the facts. This is what’s happening. On this score, we’re no different than a termite mound or a species of squirrel.
If everyone gives up their free agency and lives more like termites we can carry on longer before it all collapses. But it is going to collapse in the end eventually regardless.
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Renewables being cheaper has moved a lot of stuff over already. The reality is that a lot of the cost of burning fossil fuels is outsourced or hidden, and efforts to make the people burning it pay are also proving to be effective.
We don't really do that (Score:1)
Also the lack of birth control but that's believe it or not a lesser effect. Japan's birth rate dropped below sustainability even before they had the birth control pill available. Also Japan didn't legalize birth control until 1995 go figure...
Basically poll
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Basically polls show women want 2.6 kids however it looks like maintaining the population requires 2.7 kids.
So, we just need each kid to be 0.1 larger? Sounds like a job for childhood obesity.
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You never cease to entertain. Your posts are on the level of performance art. You do you rsilvergun.
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And we could consume so much energy that the oceans will start to boil if we don't get most of the loads off the planet first. The reason is because energy use expands to consume all available resources. Energy is an enabler for too many nice things.
I'll entirely disagree (Score:2)
We have equally demonstrated otherwise on global action. But it does require an agreed consensus that is stuck to by all major parties. ie: Serious participation at the UN.
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(stares at the ceiling for 60 seconds)
(sighs)
(takes of eyeglasses and rubs eyes)
It's heartwarming to see that there are still some last-century liberal internationalists still around. But, the last time the UN coordinated a world-wide effort, for the good of the entire planet, was the Montreal protocol. That was, what, 1987? The world is very different now, and so is the UN. Nowadays, the
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Not judging or preaching, eh?
The UN doesn't do the work and never did. It was always up the participants to execute.
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People were not born voluntarily, once alive we mostly don't die voluntarily. We won't stop voluntarily because it would be akin to dying voluntarily. We have to accept the fact that we are not in fact the Borg, we don't have one hive mind.
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Re: So it's a problem that will solve itself (Score:4, Insightful)
This has nothing to do with billionaires. You can decide right now to stop buying plastics, stop replacing your phone every year, give up your car and move to a city center, and stop supporting businesses that are oil based. If everybody who is concerned about oil consumption did this, oil consumption would shrink. Oil companies are simply meeting demand, burning more. Instead we want someone else to do something about it but no one can really say what that something is. Easier to blame the billionaires when the culprit is staring at you from the mirror. Well, if not you the who?
And I realize this may not be your specific behavior, but too many people squeal like stuck pigs when in reality it is they who refuse to change behavior.
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"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Walt Kelly
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This has nothing to do with billionaires. You can decide right now to stop buying plastics, stop replacing your phone every year, give up your car and move to a city center, and stop supporting businesses that are oil based.
I don't want to stop buying plastics. I want to have the option to buy actually recycled plastics that actually get recycled. We can do this but we don't. We don't because the people with all the money who therefore control the means of production decide that we don't. "We" is a stretchy word. So is "you" and so's "can". Sure, you can choose to opt out of society, but it would make more sense to make society not shit all over everything.
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Collective action problem [wikipedia.org]
Or maybe the idea that efforts like environmental protections are down to individual changes is and always has been a tactic by those polluters to shift blame and responsibility off to the consumer, the consumer who by individually entity have very little effect. Case in point plastic recycling; pushed for decades and decades by plastic producers as viable when it was never really so and they knew it all along. The goal of that little charade like all these claims of "oh just plan
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No, you can't.
It is nearly impossible to do the things you said unless you don't want to have a job, or eat, or participate in society in any way. I buy food at the farmer's market (when I can, which is to say, in the summer), I buy shampoo bars and get refills of various things in my resealable (plastic) containers. But my medication comes in a plastic pill bottle. I'm a programmer, so my computer has a certain amount of plastic in it. Even my bikes have a certain amount of plastic in them that I have abso
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Society determines what we need to do in order to live. Society has mandated automobiles and burning of coal. I fail to see how an individual has any role to play in that except to kill themselves to stop their personal emissions.
Re: So it's a problem that will solve itself (Score:1)
Without capitalism, AI, and social media, will we be happy again?
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You don't think Elon Musk and Bill Gates have noticed that they are completely dependent on you and your filthy little consumers and worker bees in order to have their wealth and prestige and power?
Of course they've noticed it and of course they don't like it. They are taking steps to eliminate the dependency.
Can't be done. They rely on vast global supply chains for all the perks of modern civilization just like everyone else, and that cannot simply be replaced, even if they felt like spending all their money doing so.
Tired of getting burned, so to speak (Score:3, Insightful)
Technology (Score:2)
The oil industry has a half dozen or so new technologies for extracting oil from the ground that wouldn't be otherwise accessible. They aren't using them because it costs a lot to ramp up manufacturing and deployment of new gear, and training people to use it. Fracking and traditional pumping work fine for now. Once what's available gets harder to extract using those methods, prices will go up and they'll switch to a different technology.
Re: Technology (Score:2)
"net-zero emissions by 2050" (Score:2)
What does "net-zero" mean? What does "carbon neutral" mean? Humanity will always produce large amounts of CO2 making concrete and through agriculture (and other sources). To get to "net-zero" doesn't that mean that industrial scale CO2 removal needs to begin immediately?
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I'm not sure how agriculture produces so much in CO2 as a large part of what they do in growing crops is try to get carbon in the soil for the benefit of crops on that land for generations to come. [...]
Maybe it's not the CO2, but the methane from cow belches. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, although it breaks down more rapidly in the atmosphere.
We don't need industrial scale removal of CO2 from the air because that happens naturally from just plants all over the planet taking in CO2 and in rock being weathered from wind and rain. We need only stop the CO2 we dig up and the CO2 levels in the air will come down naturally.
Fine, but let's not stop planting trees.
Oh, and we should also mention CO2 from the refining of iron and other metals. Instead of carbon from fossil fuels to remove the oxygen from the ores, with that oxygen and carbon being released as CO2, we can use hydrogen. Pump hydrogen gas through the kilns and out comes steam than CO2 and the refined metal is left behind. There are refineries that already do this. While we can use electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen there are more efficient means available. [...]
By "efficient" did you mean technologies for hydrogen harvesting that have a net carbon footprint that is lower than using fossil fuels in the kilns? Because it wouldn't make sense otherwise.
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Maybe it's not the CO2, but the methane from cow belches. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, although it breaks down more rapidly in the atmosphere.
While Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas, it is also one which gets removed rather quickly from the atmosphere, because it gets destroyed by the sunlight and turned into water and Carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide on the other hand is stable, and if not actively extracted from the atmosphere, will stay there indefinitely for billions of years.
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Calcium silicate can make concrete. Hydrogen for ammonia and (e-)fuel can come from electrolysis and thus nuclear or renewable electricity.
Switching to non emitting processes, while letting emitting processes die a natural death, is far cheaper than sequestration.
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net zero: assumption that physics works as accounting - produced CO2 gets absorbed by any process.
carbon neutral: financial trick buying carbon offsets, ie buying promises of someone else to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.
> To get to "net-zero" doesn't that mean that industrial scale CO2 removal needs to begin immediately?
Yes it does. At current scale in a year we remove less than 1 minute's worth of emissions per year.
Peak oil? (Score:2)
Wow. Hey, I know! Someone go find the Doomsday clock people. With those and maybe the end-of-antibiotics folks we can round the whole establishment anxiety parade in a weekend.
NOT a prediction FFS (Score:2)
So Slashdot runs this with the headline: "A 'Peak Oil' Prediction Surprise From the International Energy Agency"
FFS
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multiple scenarios
They missed a few important ones. Like the one about the aliens. [cartalk.com] Personally, that's the one I'm waiting for.
It's a "scenario" added under pressure (Score:3)
If you read around a few more articles on this, the new "scenario" assuming no changed regulations or programs anywhere, was added under "pressure". The IEA has some independence, and came up with the peak-before-2030 scenarios a few years ago.
OPEC+ reacted in horror and condemnation, of course, - how dare they effectively call it a sunset industry that will shrink through the 2030s - and set up their own predictions group that came up with a scenario like this one. IEA, (which isn't entirely independent, it's funded by governments, some of them petrostates, and takes funding straight from oil companies themselves) has been under pressure to add the OPEC+ "happy days" scenario to their own suite of scenarios.
The scenarios all have assumptions, and differ because of the assumptions. You can believe these are reasonable assumptions, and the earlier ones wildly optimistic. But a fifth of the cars sold last year were electric, and a quarter of the cars sold this year. The cars are getting better, the underlying battery technologies are improving visibly every year.
Bottom line, this new scenario is heavily influenced by those who would profit from it, and not likely.
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Ultimately net zero is a political decision, so a prediction of the trajectory has to predict politics ... and Trump just got elected.
Nuclear would have prevented this! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Even France, which never had a problem with nuclear, basically stopped building them in the 1990ies, and the only new plant coming online since then is the Flamanville EPR. It was always easy for electrical companies to stop nuclear projects and blame the Left and regulations, when in fact, the p
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smarter countries like S. Korea and China build nuke plants at a third of the cost we do.
Nuclear construction is not just happening in China but India, Russia, South Korea, Egypt, UK, Turkey, UAE, Bangladesh, and Japan. Again, smarter countries than the USA.
Nuclear is for base load so the turbines can go full tilt, the rest can be renewables with cheap energy storage which should be very soon.
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Batteries are catching up faster than it will be cost-effective to build nuclear in the US. A month ago, Bremen Airport announced they had integrated a new sodium-ion battery with a 400 kW output and 1 MWh capacity into its infrastructure. The entire thing apparently fits in roughly one twenty-foot shipping container, and there is almost certainly room to expand that to additional batteries to provide power through the night and beyond.
Beyond that, Peak Energy just signed a deal to build up to 4.7 GWh of so
peak oil and peak demand ... (Score:2)
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Peak oil is all about demand. Demand will vanish long before resources run dry. Shale fracking is proof of that.
And a good thing too. If we suck out every fossil and pump it into the atmosphere Earth will turn into a second Venus.
Less legit than Carnac The Magnificent (Score:3)
People need to stop just gullibly absorbing the mountains of manure published annually by these various unelected, unaccountable global organizations of faux do-gooders who live quite well pretending to do beneficial things for all of the world but actually do NOTHING of substance. NOBODY elected any of the clowns at any of these so-called "autonomous intergovernmental organizations". No normal person knows ANY of the people at these orgs, and these orgs are not accountable to any group of ordinary people; they're entities setup by collections of politicians whose citizens probably never authorized them to participate in the creation of these monsters. It's no wonder they are usually wrong in their pronouncements - there's no penalty for them being wrong. In point of fact, they're likely to get rewarded by various governments, ultra-rich persons, and/or politicians if they promote certain ideas without regard for the truth.
If you want somebody to tell you the future, you're probably better off consulting Carnac The Magnificent [wikipedia.org] - at least HE might give you a laugh and he won't raise your taxes or add regulations to the pile already on your shoulders...and he doesn't insist you pretend he is legit...
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You could just look at their web page or wikipedia to understand who they are;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Not sure what all the bellyaching and crying is about.
This article misinterprets the IEA model (Score:2)
The Current Policies Scenario model assumes all policies globally are frozen at their current state, then projects from there. It's not realistic, and not worthy of a lot of upset.
A well-informed article on the misunderstanding here: https://www.sustainabilitybynu... [sustainabi...umbers.com]