In April, I took issue with a report issued by Forfas, the Irish state industry and science body forecasting a global peak in oil production and making some policy recommendations for Ireland Opinion: Energy wasted on Forfas report
‘‘The best way to secure energy security is to have a free market . . . that’s exactly the opposite of what is happening in Russia,’’ Andrei Illarionov, president Vladimir Putin’s long-time economic adviser, told the BBC recently.
Instead of addressing these problems and the internal market reforms and multilateral solutions being undertaken by our European partners, Forfas has instead opted to peddle the ‘‘peak oil’’ theory promoted by a fringe group of environmentalists, based on an report carried out by American engineering consultant Robert Hirsch.
Hirsch is an activist in an organisation called the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO) (found on the web at http://peakoil.net), and he bases most of his work for Forfas on that of other ASPO activists, rather than mainstream analysts.
The leading figure in this movement is Dr Colin Campbell, a retired oil geologist, now living in Cork. He has spent much of the last decade spreading the apocalyptic forecast of an imminent shortfall in the supply of oil as we exhaust the Earth’s available fields.
Dr Campbell’s scientific analysis is contested by other experts and none of the authoritative studies of the world energy - by the US Geological Survey, the IEA or the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - gives it credence.
Unluckily for Forfas, the report appeared out of date even before it was released. Last Monday, Venezuela announced that it would be asking Opec to recognise it as the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, bypassing Saudi Arabia, with enough oil to maintain its current production for another two centuries.
This comes as the country’s huge stocks of ultra-heavy crude oil - which is more expensive and difficult to refine, but which is economically viable at prices above $30-$40 per barrel - is being commercially produced for the first time.
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EU energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs hopes that reforms favouring free markets and liberal institutions will provide the right multilateral framework for investment and trade between consuming and producing countries through treaties such as the Energy Charter and international institutions such as the IEA.
Instead, Forfas suggests that, even as a minnow in world politics, we somehow have the clout to cut our own bilateral deals on favourable terms with producing countries. However, a majority of the public in the EU - according to a recent Eurobarometer survey - would prefer Brussels to take the lead with a common European energy strategy.
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