The evidence from the oil industry suggests that Clarke has a point. Following the two oil shocks of the 1970s, exploration activity was high in the first half of the 1980s, then fell sharply as oil prices tumbled, and carried on declining throughout the 1990s. According to the peak oil analysis, the decline in exploration is a function of geology; there's simply less oil to find. According to Clarke, it's a question of dollars and cents, and the doubling of the oil price since 2003 should lead to renewed activity. But, as Strahan points out, that presupposes the oil is there in the first place. Even adjusted for inflation, the price of crude is much higher now than it was 50 years ago, yet discoveries of new reserves have fallen sharply over the same period. Nor does technology seem to help that much; the US and the UK have some of the most advanced oil industries in the world, yet production in both countries is still in inexorable decline.
There's not a lot of love lost between the two camps. Strahan says Clarke and, indeed, the whole of the mainstream global oil industry is in class-one denial about the looming energy crisis. Clarke's view is that the peak oilers are using a flawed methodology to come up with unfounded and alarmist conclusions. There's clearly a market out there for both books: an Internet search for "peak oil" comes up with more than six million hits.
Of the two books, Strahan's is definitely the better read. The Battle for Barrels is barely 250 pages long, but it's tough going, giving the impression of being a much shorter academic paper expanded to book length. There is far too much repetition and score-settling, and, unless you happen to work in the oil industry or be obsessed with peak oil, the excessive use of acronyms makes it impossible to read without one finger permanently wedged in the glossary at the back. The writing is leaden and all too frequently lapses into management-speak. Referring to the debate about the size of global oil reserves, for example, Clarke says: "Here it is pertinent to note that peak oil forecasters do not enjoy an undiluted view of the state or corporate portfolios that contain these internal and hidden assessments which their models logically require." Presumably that sentence means something; it is by no means clear what.
Although it will win no prizes for the limpidity of its prose, The Battle for Barrels is a useful corrective to Strahan's argument that the end is nigh. In the end, of course, the peak oil lobby will be proved right. Oil is a finite resource, and once the last drops are squeezed from the Middle East, once the Canadian tar sands have been exploited and the frozen wastes of the Antarctic have been sucked dry, the world will have to find another source of energy. What's really at issue is when that moment will be.
RSS