Born to an English coal miner's family in 1930, energy economist Peter Odell came by his lifelong interest in carbon fuels naturally. At 80, as professor emeritus of international energy studies at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, he's still interested.
Writing this month in the European Energy Review, a Netherlands-based trade magazine, Prof. Odell uses his first post-Copenhagen podium to assure people that the world will never use up its global endowment of crude oil - and that we'll consume at least twice as much of it in the 21st century as we did in the 20th.
As befits an academic who has studied oil economics for decades, Prof. Odell is an acknowledged (though often controversial and occasionally eccentric) global authority on the industry. He calculates that 1.5 trillion barrels of oil have been added to the world's proven reserves since 1971 - the year in which the U.S. hit "Hubbert's Peak" - but only 800 billion barrels have been consumed. He insists that carbon emissions have caused no significant harm so far and are very unlikely, given technological advances, to do so in the future.
He calculates that China's increase in emissions every day exceed Denmark's celebrated reductions for an entire year. He remains sympathetic (but not committed) to the notion of Russian and Ukrainian theorists that oil is a renewable, self-perpetuating resource. He thinks China will one day buy Exxon, and Russia will one day buy Shell. He predicts that the best days for North Sea oil are still ahead (with 30 billion barrels left to go).
In his most recent comments, he sets out to de-mythologize the popular but dubious belief that there is an inherent scarcity in the world's carbon fuel resources. In fact, Prof. Odell says, there is no need to foreswear carbon fuels any time in the foreseeable future - which, by his reckoning, takes us safely through 2050 at a minimum, more probably through 2080 and perhaps through 2100.
He concedes that production of conventional oil will peak around 2050 but insists that the cause will be a global preference for natural gas, not a scarcity of oil. Even in 2100, he says, oil will supply 20 per cent of the world's energy, natural gas another 20 per cent.
"The oft-heard notion that we are 'about to run out of fossil fuels' is quite simply a myth," he writes. "Nor is it true to say that hydrocarbon production is about to 'peak' any time soon. At least for the first half of the 21st century carbon energy demand limitations will bring no more than modest pressure to bear on the eminently plentiful and generally profitable-to-produce flows of coal, oil and natural gas that are available."
His argument continues: "To begin with, the world's presently known coal reserves of some 6,300 gigatons are equal to a nominal close-to-1,000 years' supply. ... Total [coal]use over the [next]100 years will be of the order of about 700 gigatons ... constituting about 11 per cent of the commodity's resource base." (One gigaton is the measure of an explosive force equal to one billion tons of TNT.)
As for conventional oil, he says, annual production will rise slowly in the next generation - to about 4.5 gigatons in 2030. Current known reserves of recoverable oil now exceed 200 gigatons.
By conservative calculations, Prof. Odell says, non-conventional oil production (oil sands, shale) will increase rapidly throughout the century, reaching five gigatons a year by 2080. Total production in the entire century will reach 265 gigatons, he writes.
Over the 21st century as a whole, he says, 1,660 gigatons (of oil-equivalent energy) will be produced and used - compared with a cumulative total in the 20th century of 500 gigatons. In other words, the world will use three times as much energy in the 21st century as it did in the 20th. This threefold increase will primarily reflect "the bountiful nature of the world's endowment of carbon fuels."
Any significant reduction of carbon emissions in this century, Prof. Odell says, is highly improbable, a conclusion anticipated (he argues) by the Kyoto Protocol. Kyoto required reductions in carbon emissions from a 1990 base - when 3.5 gigatons of oil-equivalent carbon energy was consumed. Instead, by 2005, 4.7 gigatons was consumed. "In marked contrast to this 1.2 gigaton ... rise in carbon energy use," he says, "use of renewables increased by less than 0.2 gigatons oil equivalent. Of this ... 83 per cent was accounted for by nuclear power - a pseudo-renewable energy source."
As for emissions, Prof. Odell warns that the biggest risk ahead arises from the abrupt closing down of oil production or gas production infrastructure. Without prudent management of drill sites and pipelines, a kind of wildfire release of CO{-2} could occur, releasing vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. He rates this risk at a tick above zero.
Oh yes. Prof. Odell believes production costs for oil will run between $10 (U.S.) and $40 a barrel (inflation adjusted) through the next 25 years - meaning that the quoted price in the years ahead should "remain modest" at roughly $50 a barrel. He could be wrong, of course. But he could be right. In retrospect, optimists often are.