By Dr. Colin Campbell

Dr. Colin Campbell is one of the first professional petroleum geologists since M. King Hubbert identify the inevitability of peak oil, a phenomenon that sees demand for petroleum exceeding supply. He wrote the following letter to the Manchester Guardian in response to its series of articles about peak oil, especially its report that the IEA was downplaying oil and gas field depletion rates globally, while exaggerating the potential of future field discoveries in its World Energy Outlooks.

Comment Editor
The Guardian

Dear Sir,

I was most impressed that you should give such prominence in your issue of 10th November to the role of the International Energy Agency in assessing the status of oil depletion. It is one of the most important issues facing the modern world, given the current dependence on cheap oil-based energy.

I can provide you with some more information on the topic, touching on my own experience. I first became aware of the issue in 1969 in Chicago when I was part of a team making a world evaluation for Amoco (now part of BP). Later when I was managing Fina in Norway, I had the company sponsor a research project on the subject with the Norwegian authorities. We used public reserve data, as I had not then appreciated how unreliable they were.

The results were published as The Golden Century of Oil 1950-2050 (Kluwer Academic). This attracted the interest of Petroconsultants, a company based in Geneva that was used by the international oil companies to assemble a valid database on oil activities around the world including the size of discoveries and drilling statistics. They invited me to redo the study but this time using their comprehensive database of virtually all the world’s fields. I was joined in this project by Jean Laherrère, formerly Exploration Manager of the French oil company TOTAL, who had developed various analytical techniques. The resulting study was published at $50 000 a copy, but was later suppressed under pressure from a major US oil company, which had better remain nameless. However, Petroconsultants co-published a book, The Coming Oil Crisis (Multi-Science), which I wrote summarising the results, and also agreed that Laherrère and I should accept an invitation to write an article for the Scientific American : The End of Cheap Oil (March 1998).

The IEA purchased this book and contacted me, sending an analyst to spend a week going through the data. It was evident that the team within the IEA working on the subject was fully convinced and saw its importance. They then produced a report for the G8 Ministers, meeting in Moscow (International Energy Agency, 1998, World Energy Prospects to 2020; Report to G8 Energy Ministers, March 31 www.iea.org/g8/world/oilsup.htm). The text was bland enough but it contained a critical table showing that oil demand would outpace supply by 2010, save for the entry of an item called Unidentified Unconventional, whose supply was shown to meet as much as 20% of the world’s needs by 2020. Having managed to get it past the G8 Ministers, the IEA team was able to include it in the World Energy Outlook for 1998.

In effect, the Unidentified Unconventional was a coded message for shortage. I explained this to a journalist who contacted the element within the IEA which was pleased that this important hidden message should get out. But when it was published (Fleming D., 1999, The next oil shock? Prospect April), the IEA evidently got into serious trouble with its masters in the OECD governments, and in the next issue of the World Energy Outlook, the Unidentified Unconventional became Conventional Non-OPEC, without comment or explanation.

The primary function of the IEA was to supervise OECD strategic stocks, which in turn were perceived to be a certain defence against any excessive demands by OPEC. So the IEA came to see its role as protecting consumers’ interests, and it therefore had every reason to downplay any notion of depletion and finite limits imposed by Nature, because indirectly such would strengthen the hand of OPEC.

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