Tuesday | May 19, 2009

Late in the year 1085, William I (William the Conquer) of England ordered his counsellors to conduct a kingdom-wide survey to find out how much property and livestock each landholder had and what it was worth. The book containing those tax rolls became known through the writings of Richard fitzNagel in 1179 as the Domesday Book, from whence we get the corrupted term Doomsday: the "Day of Judgement."

On the same day President Barack Obama announced the federal government's new, unified fuel economy standards, Congressmen Roscoe Barlett (R, MD) and Eliot Engel (D, NY) introduced HR 2326, otherwise known as the Oil Savings Act. The explanatory preamble to the bill reads...

The Oil Savings Act, H.R. 2326, addresses a critical weakness identified by the General Accounting Office: the lack of a formal strategy by the federal government to coordinate plans to achieve oil savings targets or to mitigate the consequences of precipitous short-term or long-term reductions in world oil supplies.  The bill would require the federal government to establish an interagency working group to lead and coordinate the development and implementation of an action plan to achieve oil savings targets of 2,500,000 barrels of oil per day by 2015; 7,000,000 barrels of oil per day by 2025; and 10,000,000 barrels of oil per day by 2030. The bill also requires the interagency working group to lead and coordinate a supply disruption strategy for Federal departments and agencies to develop contingency plans in the event of a supply disruption resulting in a precipitous and short-term annualized decline of 4 percent of world oil production. In addition, the bill requires the interagency working group to lead and coordinate a peak oil strategy for Federal departments and agencies to develop contingency plans in the event of a peak and subsequent annualized decline of 4 percent of world oil production.

Congressman Bartlett has long argued that peak oil is a clear and present danger and that America is not sufficiently prepared to deal with its eventuality, much less any likely disruptions in oil supply, which will have a profoundly disruptive effect on the nation's economy.

The passage of HR 2326 sets the nation on record that peak oil is an inevitable event that must be prepared for by setting oil savings goals starting with 2.5 million barrels a day by 2015, or nearly 1 billion barrels annually. Not coincidentally, President Obama's announcement today is estimated to save 1.8 billion barrels "over the lifetime of the vehicles sold in the next five years." Achieving the even more demanding goals for 2025 and 2030 will require a major shift away from petroleum use in motor vehicles well beyond that envisioned in the President's initiatives.

While HR 2326's targets seem a bit arbitrary, it is largely because we just don't know how much oil there is left to be economically extracted. Since most of the world's reserves are in national government hands, no one other than the producing countries themselves have any accurate sense of how much petroleum and natural gas we can expect to produce into the future.

As Matthew Simmons and others have long argued, we need the modern day equivalent of William's Domesday Book, so the entire planet has a sense of what's left of the estimated 3 trillion barrels we think is the planet's finite limit. This much seems pretty certain, most of the easy to get to and exploit is now gone. What's left is thick, sticky, contaminated, over-ripe, under-ripe or just plain hard to get at.

In the absence of an oil industry Domeday accounting, we have HR 2326.

 

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