The British Government does not have its own, independent assessment of the global supply of oil, according to an article by environmental campaigner, George Monbiot, in today’s UK Guardian. If correct, this is surely gross dereliction of a Government’s duty — to ensure adequate supplies of affordable energy, to anticipate possible future shortages or emergencies, and to undertake appropriate contingency planning for them. Surely, this requires the Government to forecast possible demands and supplies. Is the Government asleep?

“Nine months ago, I asked the British government to send me its assessments of global oil supply. The results astonished me: there weren’t any. Instead it relied exclusively on one external source: a book published by the International Energy Agency. The omission became stranger still when I read this book and discovered that it was a crude polemic, dismissing those who questioned future oil supplies as “doomsayers” without providing robust evidence to support its conclusions. Though the members of Opec have a powerful interest in exaggerating their reserves in order to boost their quotas, the IEA relied on their own assessments of future supply.

Last week I tried again, and I received the same response: “The government agrees with IEA analysis that global oil (and gas) reserves are sufficient to sustain economic growth for the foreseeable future.” Perhaps it hasn’t noticed that the IEA is now backtracking. The Financial Times says the agency “has admitted that it has been paying insufficient attention to supply bottlenecks as evidence mounts that oil is being discovered more slowly than once expected … natural decline rates for discovered fields are a closely guarded secret in the oil industry, and the IEA is concerned that the data it currently holds is not accurate.” What if the data turns out to be wrong? What if Opec’s stated reserves are a pack of lies? What contingency plans has the government made? Answer comes there none.”

Monbiot’s main point is about biofuels, which we will summarize in the next post.

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This entry was posted on February 12th, 2008 at 12:08 (GMT) and is filed under Alternative Energy, Policy, UK Energy Policy . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.