Section » Quote of the Week
Report from Lloyds of London (insurance) and Chatham House (strategic studies)
“Even before we reach peak oil, we could witness an oil supply crunch because of increased Asian demand. Major new investment in energy takes 10-15 years from the initial investment to first production, and to date we have not seen the amount of new projects that would supply the projected increase in demand.”
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Matthew Kotchen, professor of environmental economics and policy, Yale University
Another reason for the timidity on reducing U.S. consumption is that the easiest change, a tax on oil, is the riskiest politically. “A price signal on oil - that could be your climate change policy; that could be your energy policy. But it’s difficult because it’s not politically expedient.”
Paul Krugman, author and New York Times columnist
“We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost - to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs - will nonetheless be immense.”
John R. Boyce, University of Calgary economist
“The data resoundingly rejects … peak oil. In all aspects, I find the peak oil model an inadequate empirical representation of historical patterns. This is not to say that oil production may eventually peak. It does say that the peak oil model will have little, if anything, to say about it.”
Ferdinand Banks, energy economist and widely published author
“What some observers call the shale gas ‘revolution’ might turn out to be no more than one of those mammoth ‘spin’ jobs that are mainly concerned with increasing somebody’s money and power. Personally, for reasons given below, I remain skeptical to a large part of the shale gas song-and-dance, but admittedly I could be completely wrong.”
Paul Horsnell, Barclays lead oil industry analyst, in a recent report
“Oil will be slower onstream, more expensive to produce, it will be more politicized and there will be less of it. All of those are factors that make us look at the current back of the oil curve and see it as undervalued at current levels of a shade below $100. We see the consequences as being more severe than the postponement of Gulf Coast volumes. It looks likely to become an iconic event,
Steven Kopits, director NYC office of Douglas-Westwood
“[EIA's] forecasts to 2020 are 2-3 mbpd lower than that of traditionally dour Total, the French oil major. And they are below our own forecasts at Douglas-Westwood through 2020. As we are normally considered to be in the peak oil camp, the EIA’s forecast is nothing short of remarkable, and grim.”
Tad Padzek, Chairman Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Dept., University of Texas at Austin
[After reviewing a live video of BP's oil leak in the Gulf] “It’s not going well. You have more or less the equivalent of six fire hoses blasting oil and gas upwards and two fire hoses blasting mud. They are losing the competition.”
Gregory W. Slayton, reinsurance expert at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business
“It’s a huge mess and the liabilities are in the billions possibly the tens of billions. This is a failure of risk management of epic proportions.”
Ben P. Dell and Noam Lockshin, for Bernstein Research
“The Barnett remains important as the only shale play that has been developed to maturity. We believe that the Barnett largely dispels the belief that modern shale production is a „manufacturing process,‟ or that shales constitute „gas factories.‟ That belief is premised on the idea that shales have large cores that are uniform, that each well is similar, and that over time wells get better.
