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April 10, 2006
Total Peak
By: Silvio
Do you know who Christophe de Margerie is?
Well, he's probably one of th e most important - and informed - men in the oil business: he is the head of the Exploration-Production area of Total S.A., one of the top four oil companies in the world (headquartered in Paris, it employs more than 100,000 people and in 2004 had revenues for $178.3 billions) - and he is one of the most serious candidate to its future leadership after Thierry Desmarest, the current chairman, will leave his spot.
So, he usually knows what he's talking about - at least when he's talking about world oil consumption and production.
Well, in a recent article on The Times, he said that
Numbers like 120 million barrels per day will never be reached, never120 million barrels per day is the amount of daily oil consumption that the IEA predicted for the year 2030. By the way, the Agency, in its World Energy Outlook, also said that the investments required to raise output to this level will be more than $3 trillion, used for wells, pipelines and refineries (that's 25% of 2005 U.S. Gross Domestic Product)
So what we are discovering here is that, despite the HUGE amount of money needed in investments - money that will probably be invested, diverting it from more important and long-sighted projects - we already know (at least, a quite important figure in the oil industry does) that we will never be able to reach the amount "needed" by our world - in other worlds, even Total is telling us that we will be peaking soon.
Why are we still waiting to change our cultural and social habits toward a less oil (and energy altogether)-dependent world? I betcha Christophe doesn't have an answer to this...
Posted by Silvio at April 10, 2006 6:53 AM Category: Peak Oil