Awesome... I am at 15 minutes into the vid... and this guy has already confirmed there would be not enough oil in the future and that mature oil fields are declining very rapidly. I wish people who're actually going to run the country take this entire picture into account.

I'm seeing no link above (with Firefox and Flash player 10). Seems to be to do with the arguments included.

thanks for this video.

Birol annoyes me !
He is the best IPCC spokesman out there for the moment touting about this (hopeless IMO) Carbon capture and storage, giving no second thoughts on as to how scalability and pace will be solved.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm onbord and agree to the urgency regarding climate, but free me from Birol telling me this. I'd like to hear him say two words on Peak_Underscore_Oil instead !

Whatever else he is telling is loosely anchored to a sandy bank, but when listening carefully he is saying we are at Peak Oil NOW folks ..... but without never usinge those words nor rising his vioce.(Bad performance)

And from the video, at time 47:35 Sallys Question is a good one but Birols/IEA answer is shocking, at least to me.

The IEAs forcasting methodology up till this years WEO2008 has been something like this :
Birol : " ..... up to now we all (IEA,EIA,EU) made the projections that we have a global oil
demand and then you look at the non-Opec supply and the rest will be met by OPEC ... (!)"

Just like that, in plain words. No wonder some agencies still see 130 mb/d in 2030 .... just like that

Hello Nate,

Thxs for the video. The ASPO rep [kudos to her] asked the right question, but Fatih didn't give an answer, dammit.

She basically asked: What 'Evidence' do you have that OPEC & OECD will find the future equivalent of 4 Saudi Arabias just to offset the 6.4% postPeak depletion to keep production flat, much less finding 6 KSAa to meet expected demand growth?

I bet he didn't answer the question because he knows he doesn't have any supporting evidence. Therefore, it was a lost golden opportunity for him to Clearly State that we are in for some rough, downhill sledding ahead.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

The video is confirmation that the red flashing light has started up over at the IEA.

So the next 5 years;

All the paper printing will eventually sink in and prices will begin to slowly rise after years of firesales, demand will still be low due to tighter credit conditions. Unemployment will remain stubbornly high. Many oil investments will get cancelled. The Trillions needed to bring new potential supply online will be spent on sorting out the financial mess, bailing its institutions but the general infrastructure will improve including electrical power supply and capabilities.

Oil demand will creep back up to potential supply then one of the major fields will undergo a big big and 'unexpected' decline (think Canterell). Possibly one of the Saudi fields. This is the Black Swan Event.

People who have read and understand the IEA report will say "I told you so -we simply havn't been investing enough" and the mass of the people will begin to 'get-it' as $8 gas and filling station linups plunge the economy back into another recession. The evening news will be full of analysis of why its happening. TOD hits will go through the roof. This is the "PO Epiphany Event" -far more important than PO itself and far more important than last years which was masked by financial turmoil.

I put this around 2011-2013.

If it does happen at the tail end of Obamas term its going to be a toss up whether the people will see through to the real causes or simply blame the incumbent government: "Drill baby drill" will probably be resurrected as the party slogan of The Opposition and least best saviour. I expect a lot of Govt. flip-flopping in the decades ahead 'It's the Economy Stupid' -no, actually it's 'expensive energy stupid' but lets see who gets it first...

So the decisions of the next few years will not just define the shape of the coming decade but possibly the future of Industrial Mankind itself.

Nick.

since when did the IEA have official directive to investigate Global Warming?!

I know I am a minority here, but running out of the fuel of modern life and the study on climate change are not mandatory tandem subjects of study.

Anyway, one will solve the other.

The host asks about greater efficiencies and questions Fatih's negative outlook. Within his comments he says there are some 130 (#?) offshore rigs under construction.

Does this seem like it could be accurate?

He also questioned why, given all those rigs under construction, we couldn't find 5, 6 or 7 new Tupis. He asks this as if Fatih is a bit dense.

Does he not know the very, very slow progress at Tupi? Does he not know Tupi will likely not produce more than 1mb/d (being very generous, imho) and that even 7 Tupis meets only about 10% of future need given decline rates?

Criminy...

I feel like we have really fallen through the Rabbit Hole. On one hand we have this IEA speech from Fatih Birol (who can hardly be called a fringe nut-case) which clearly demonstrates that PO can GW are issues that need to be taken seriously (an understatement).

On the other hand, a couple of days ago, I attended a “Listening Session” sponsored by Russ Feingold, our Wisconsin US Senator. Naively, I prepared a statement that would take about 8 minutes for me to read. It provided a short overview of the PO and GW issues and then urged the senator to support laws and regulations designed to mitigate the threats associated with these issues. My friends, including college professors, reviewed the statement and they felt that it was clearly written, easy to understand, and relevant for the listening session. There was no inflammatory rhetoric or wild statements – actually, most TOD readers would think the dangers were understated.

The Senator clearly was not in a mood for this type of input. He seemed distracted and hardly looked at me. After 3 or 4 minutes he interrupted me and asked if I was “almost finished”. I tried to read faster, but a minute or two later he announced that I was finished and we needed to move on to the next person. His total time at this event was one hour and 15 minutes.

A couple of other people raised questions about the possibility of raising gasoline taxes to discourage excessive consumption. He said he was very much opposed to putting more of a burden on the backs of people who were already financially stressed. Although he said he would try to keep an open mind. That seemed to be the extent of his interest in PO or GW.

How can we expect to see any meaningful government intervention with this kind of attitude on the part of a senator who bills himself as a “Progressive”? I realize that most TOD readers see government as irrelevant as the PO & GW scenarios unfold. But, I also suspect that some of us still have some hope that there is a useful government role to lessen the impact or avoid the worst scenarios. The question is – how do we motivate these representatives? Or, more importantly, how can their voting constituents be educated about the dangers? Currently, my personal observation is that most people are very skeptical and cynical about these issues – just blame “big oil” and “goofy tree huggers”.

Hmmm ... Fatih's 15 minute executive summary at the begining should be on the national news channels, hopefully a lot more people would get the predicament the world almost certainly finds itself in. I’ll send the link to my MP … this is serious stuff indeed!

So ...

What happens if there isn't actually a viable way to adequately capture carbon from coal and gas and oil consumption?

What happens if there isn't enough Uranium available in the timescales required?

What happens if there isn't enough money to invest in CCS, nuclear and alternatives like windmills and efficiency gains?

What happens if the US doesn’t massively and rapidly plan to reduce it’s per capita consumption of oil to the same level as Chindia?

There’s a lot more ‘ifs’ like those questions as well!

Sometime in the future, people will look back on this time and label us as verifiably insane. It will be necessary to bring up only one argument, which is:

"They found out that burning fossil fuels caused climate change, and yet they continued doing it. Worse, they decided to capture and store some of the excess CO2 they were producing. What were they thinking we would do with it? They were not only ruining their own world but ensuring that we would continue to have to deal with their troubles long after they were gone!"

Who in the future is going to take care of that captured and stored CO2 - to make sure that it doesn't get out and cause yet more problems? Who now is willing to claim that our current civilization is so important that we can put our offspring at such risk?

Coal miners know what carbon sequestration looks like.

Fatih Birol and The End of the Peak Oil Hysteria: It has been rebranded Climate Change Hysteria

Fatih Birol's remarks before the Council of Foreign Relations effectively indicated the central concern of the intellectuals, energy agencies, large businesses and political class of the developed world, and it is NOT peak oil.

The intellectual effort, the publications and further research, education and resources of the world's intellectual class is now focused almost laser like on what they see as the single great danger to humankind and possibly to all species on the Earth: Climate Change.

Fatih Birol did give us one fact as definitive: OECD oil consumption has peaked. Yes, Fatih Birol of the IEA has declared peak, but it is a peak in consumption instead of production.

This means, and Fatih was very clear in stressing this, that global warming is in many ways a world threat that is now in the hands of the Chinese, Indians, and other developing nations. If the U.S., Japan, and Europe do everything they can to stop increases and perhaps even reduce carbon release but cannot get the developing world to buy into the arrangements and take part in carbon reduction, then the developed nations are essentially engaging in a hobby, tilting at windmills and wasting their time and money.

Interestingly, after pointing out early in the speech that the problem is coal burning, the rest of the discussion by Birol and the questioners was spent dealing with oil! Why? A huge part of the solution would be to reduce waste of electric energy, convert to nuclear, naturual gas and renewable energy, and decommision coal plants, and absolutely forbid building anymore of them. How simple, except Birol knew he was preaching to the choir. The OECD can and possibly will do the above. But will China, India and the poorest countries of the world agree to such an expensive program? Can they afford to even if they want to?

Birol is essentionally laying out the blueprint for the future in the OECD: The energy utilities and the transportation industry will have no choice but to spend money and effort funding universities, entreprenuers, intellectuals, subcontracters, and financial investments to reduce carbon release. Any carbon releasing utiliity must be very afraid now, and any industry which relies heavily on transportation must be seeking ways to reduce carbon release NOW.

This is interestng, because just as Saudi Arabia has feared, it simply will not matter whether they can deliver the oil or not, the consuming industries will essentially be for the most part barred from using it. The coal industry must, for the most part, cease to exist, at least in the U.S., as we can assume that OECD nations will tighten the noose ever tighter around the neck of any industry that survives by putting carbon into the air.

The last phase may take a bit longer, but every trend, every indication, every projection one can make based on current evidence indicates that it is true: The much kick down "renewable" energies are poised to become the fastest growing industry on Earth since the dawn of the automobile. If we take Fatih Birol serious as a thinker and as reading the projections correctly into the future, there is no choice. We know that the EROEI of oil and natural gas is going down. We know that due to efficiencies in production and reduction in raw material imput per kilowatt produced for the solar industry, EROEI of solar and other renewables are going up. The advantage is moving to the true renewables such as solar, wind, ocean wave and some geothermal even before we declare an emergency due to carbon release. Once the petroleum industry is no longer allowed to externalize the cost of carbon release, the die is cast. Renewables with efficiency planning, and nationwide methane recapture is the only path forward. It is now almost certain that if China, India and the developing world will join in this new technological revolution, most of the last trillion barrels of oil on earth will remain in the ground. And if the developing countries will not join this revolution, nothing that Europe, Japan and the U.S. do will matter anyway.

RC

This is an excellent video. Though at times, Fatih Birol is hard to understand. For a moment, I thought he was talking about "gigabytes" instead of "gigawatts".

Is there a transcript for this anywhere?

I'm surprised this video hasn't gotten more attention (only a few comments compared to the Drumbeat)

I suppose technically it's nothing new, but to hear Birol speaking and see people discussing it is really something else