Oil Gap: NPC's 'Hard Truths'

The National Petroleum Council's global energy future study, which was undertaken some 18 months ago, involved the input of some 350 experts, two-thirds from outside the oil and gas industry. Their findings were published yesterday in a 400-plus pages draft report that is available on the organization's web site.

Entitled "Facing Hard Truths about Energy", the report dissects the challenges of powering the future out to the year 2030 into six major categories:

• Demand
• Supply
• Energy sources
• Energy security
• Workforce
• Carbon emissions

The panel said that it reached out to more than a 1,000 subject matter experts, 120 of them in the energy efficiency sector alone. Alan Kelly emphasized that the report is not a forecast, but an effort to understand why the wide divergence of views and from that develop a set of strategies (Oil Gap: NPC's Energy Game Plan) for America to deal with the inevitable growing gap between energy demand (in particular for oil and gas) and supply of conventional petroleum resources.

While organizations like the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO USA) are referenced in both the study and panel slides, they have been critical of the report's findings, labeling them a "dry hole" whose findings didn't really answer the question of how much oil is left. In fairness to the NPC, the actually report and its 122-page executive summary didn't become available for public access until late yesterday afternoon, so some of ASPO and ODAC's concerns may have been addressed.

Perhaps the most sobering assessment to come out of the panel presentation is that even if there is sufficient diverse energy resources below the ground, the cost of building the necessary production, storage and distribution infrastructure to handle all these different resources is $20 trillion by at least one estimate.

The above MP3 recording is some 36-minutes in length a 8.2MB in size. The presenters are the key panel members who oversaw their respective portions of the study. They are, in order of appearance: James Burkhard, Donald Paul, Edward Chow and Rodney Nelson.

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