Peak Oil Analysis is Flawed Says CERA

Here’s something that will get the peak oil pundits up in arms. Oil industry analysts Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) argue that the peak oil theory is based on “faulty analysis.”

It could, if accepted they argue, “distort critical policy and investment decisions and cloud the debate over the energy future”. They are arguing that the remaining global oil resource base is actually 3.74 trillion barrels — three times as large as the 1.2 trillion barrels estimated by the theory’s proponents.

“The global resource base of conventional and unconventional oils, including historical production of 1.08 trillion barrels and yet-to-be-produced resources, is 4.82 trillion barrels and likely to grow,” says CERA.

CERA Director of Oil Industry Activity Peter M. Jackson argues that: “The ‘peak oil’ theory causes confusion and can lead to inappropriate actions and turn attention away from the real issues,” Jackson observes.  “Oil is too critical to the global economy to allow fear to replace careful analysis about the very real challenges with delivering liquid fuels to meet the needs of growing economies.  This is a very important debate, and as such it deserves a rational and measured discourse.”

“This is the fifth time that the world is said to be running out of oil,” argues CERA Chairman Daniel Yergin, author of the oil-industry sop, The Prize.  “Each time — whether it was the ‘gasoline famine’ at the end of WWI or the ‘permanent shortage’ of the 1970s — technology and the opening of new frontier areas has banished the specter of decline.  There’s no reason to think that technology is finished this time.”