Years ago, we were told that fossil fuels were done for.
How is that going now?
Suggesting that fossil fuels will stay around for a long time remains taboo in the energy debate. In climate change gatherings, the world has agreed to “consign coal to history” and “transition away” from oil and natural gas. It has signaled, too, “the beginning of the end” of the fossil-fuel era and a “swift” transition to renewables.
The knowledgeable Mr. Blas is exaggerating, surely for effect. As he will know, climatists’ claims of (almost) imminent peak fossil fuel have been regarded as a joke by many outside that ecosystem for some years. But they have mattered for many reasons, not least their use as a justification for the decision by many ESG-influenced investors to cut back on oil and gas investments. They were not, these investors maintained, disengaging from fossil fuels for ideological reasons, but because they were looking to the future, not the past, oil and gas fields would become stranded assets, and so on.
Blas:
Just two years ago, the International Energy Agency unequivocally said that fossil-fuel demand would peak before the end of this decade. It was a black-and-white statement that left no wiggle room. “The world is on the cusp of a historic turning point,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said at the time, adding: “This is the first time that a peak in demand is visible for each fuel this decade — earlier than many people anticipated.”
As I noted in a July 2023 Capital Letter, the IEA was an organization that had lost its way:
There was a time when the IEA (International Energy Agency) could be taken seriously. Established as part of the OECD response to the 1973 Arab oil embargo, it was, among things, a provider of great amounts of useful data on the oil and gas sector (and, in many respects, it still is). However, international organizations are what they are and mission creep is what it is, and the IEA has embraced climate millenarianism.
And now it is slowly getting back in touch with reality.
Blas:
[The IEA] was premature, in part because it didn’t anticipate an obvious flaw: governments backpedaling on their clean-energy commitments. Thus, the IEA is now in retreat. The agency, whose analysis is closely followed, isn’t so sure anymore about a peak. Maybe coal will reach a zenith, but oil may not, and gas certainly won’t. And when, and if, fossil-fuel demand eventually tops out, it will do so at a higher level than the agency anticipated, in some cases barely showing any reduction from today’s consumption levels.
Blas is being too kind. That particular IEA claim of peak fossil fuel was made in 2023. It was already clear by then that, with or without Donald Trump, governments were going to backpedal on their “clean-energy commitments.” And this was despite the global inspiration provided (various British prime ministers have told their voters) by the U.K.’s commitment to net zero. Amazing!
What the IEA had done, fatally, was let its mission as analysts, the gathering of data and preparation of projections, become, in the case of the projections, corrupted by purpose. Its projections were, to no small part, designed as propaganda, which meant that, as projections, they were useless, or worse.
In a Corner post on “peak oil” in February, I noted that:
I’m old enough to remember when ESG promoters were warning of the dangers that hydrocarbons might be become “stranded assets,” of no or only limited value. For a number of reasons that was not likely to be the case any time soon. Besides, forecasting “peak” oil, gas, and even coal has never been a precise science.
Under the circumstances, it was interesting to read in the FT that Vitol, the world’s largest independent energy trader, said this week that global demand for oil would not fall until at least 2040. OPEC has a still later date (2045), and the U.S. EIA estimates 2050. The climatists at the International Energy Agency are sticking with 2030, but even that is followed by a plateau. [Emphasis added.]
Not anymore.
I added that those forecasts were:
just additional reminders that the energy “transition” has been wildly exaggerated. The vast investments in renewables have, at great cost, helped meet additional energy demand, but hydrocarbons still account for 80 percent of world energy consumption.
By National Review – https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/oil-still-slick/
