End of Oil Age Spurs Rise of the Electric Car

Deutsche Bank's year-long series of forward-looking reports on the oil market is helping fuel the shift to more energy efficient vehicles, writes Steven LeVine.

Published: 29-Dec-2010

By Steve LeVine

For the last year, Deutsche Bank's Paul Sankey, one of the best long-range energy minds on Wall Street, has been distributing a series of provocative, deeply researched, and forward-looking notes to clients under titles like "The Peak Oil Market" and "The End of the Oil Age." Last week, Sankey produced a sixth note called "2011 and Beyond -- A Reality Check." Among the takeaways: As of 2010, the new electric car age is coming upon us faster than expected -- far beyond this year's conspicuous arrival of the General Motors Volt and Nissan Leaf, and the race among the world's industrial nations to dominate this technology. Converging even more rapidly, says Sankey, are far higher oil and gasoline prices, starting in 2012. Such shifts could have enormous geopolitical ramifications -- as a consequence, some countries will become poorer, and some richer, with corresponding impacts on their global influence.

Starting with the second forecast from this 59-page report, 2010 has seen a comparatively gentle respite in an otherwise unprecedented, decade-long period of turbulence in oil markets. According to Sankey, this calm is about to break. Sankey's forecast is based on the salient factor of "spare capacity." (If you are already familiar with the term, skip to the next paragraph. If you aren't, read on.) This refers to how much oil the world's petrostates can produce above and beyond current demand. So for instance, Saudi Arabia pumps about 8 million barrels of oil a day, but has dug enough wells in enough new fields to produce 50 percent more than that -- or 12 million barrels a day -- if it needs to. That excess Saudi productive capacity of 4 million barrels a day, plus about 1 million barrels a day of extra productive capability elsewhere, adds up to a global surplus of about 5 million barrels a day of spare oil production capacity -- the available volume above and beyond the 87 million barrels of oil a day consumed around the world.

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