Leonardo Maugeri ner för räkning på 7

Vi har tidigare skrivit lite om den italienska tokstollen Leonardo Maugeri som fått omotiverat stor uppmärksamhet med sin ”rapport om Peak Oil” nyligen. Att denna man nu ska vara gästföreläsare vid det prestigefyllda Harvard Universitet i USA är minst sagt talande för hur desperat man försöker vilseleda media och allmänheten om sanningen om världens råoljeproduktion. Detta istället för att belysa det faktum att råoljeproduktionen sedan 2005 legat på i princip samma nivå och att det alltså är detta som är den huvudsakliga orsaken bakom uppgången i oljepriset och inte politisk tumult eller minskad ekonomisk aktivitet pga av nuvarande skuldkris. 

Till om med IMF uppmärksammade detta i en rapport i maj. 

Maugeris ”rapport” påminner oss om den helt ovetenskapligt grundade rapporten som Finansdepartementet beställde av Øystein Noreng och som presenterades i Rosenbad den 30 mars i år. 

Maugeri skriver i sin rapport:

”I motsats till vad de flesta människor tror, växer utbudet av olja i världen i en tidigare ej skådad omfattning som till och med kan överstiga efterfrågan. Detta kan leda till överproduktion och en brant nergång i oljepriset…den ökade produktionskapaciteten kan fram till 2020 öka med ytterligare 17.6 miljoner fat per dag, vilket ger en produktionskapacitet i världen på 110,6 miljoner fat per dag ”  (2011 producerade världen 84,7 miljoner fat per dag-enligt EIA. 

Tidigare var Matthieu Auzanneau snabbt ute och kritiserade Maugeris ”rapport” i franska Le Monde men nu åker alltså Maugeri på en fullständig knockout efter 7 tunga slag av Oliver Rech.

Oliver Rech som var ansvarig för IEA:s ”Prospect Petrouleum Strategy” mellan 2006-2009 och idag leder Energy Funds Advisors, ett konsultföretag som bland jobbar på uppdrag åt La Française AM, ett stort parisbaserat företag inom asset management.  

Oliver Rech har sedan tidigare förutspått att en nedgång i världens samlade oljeproduktion (alltså inte bara för råoljan), sannolikt sker mellan 2015-2020. Men låt oss nu gå över till Rechs genomgång av Maugeris ”rapport”:

  

• “First of all, a general comment on Mr Maugeri’s analysis: it stops in 2020. How comforting not to have to deal with whatever happens beyond that date, particularly when it comes to production declines in existing fields”.

• “Leonardo Maugeri states that the decline rate for existing production is now “2 to 3% a year.”. This number seems about right to me, at least for non OPEC production. However, Mr Maugeri assumes, with no justification, that it will remain constant over time. There again, the hypothesis is comforting, though very probably false. To the contrary, historical analysis shows that the rate of decline has been increasing for at least ten years”. 

I grafen nedan visar Oliver Rech den allt snabbare Produktionsminskningen i oljeproducerande länder utanför OPEC 

        "An acceleration of this order is coherent with the evolution of the resource. New fields coming on line will tend to be smaller. As it happens, a priori, the smaller a field is, the faster its rate of decline will be. Moreover, a rising proportion of new fields coming on line are off-shore projects. Experience shows, particularly in the North Sea (where Mr Maugeri admits that production is in “apparently irreversible decline”), that offshore fields decline more rapidly as operators seek to raise production as quickly as possible in order to recover their considerable investments as fast as they can. In so doing, they very often accelerate the ensuing decline”. 

•  "Mr Maugeri asserts that new production capacity could reach 49 Mbd by 2020 and no-one has any way of knowing how he arrived at this figure. He then goes on to reduce it to 29 Mbd, taking into account, he says, certain “risks” and “restrictions”. Nowhere does he explain how he arrived at the original 49 Mbd figure. Thus the 29 Mbd figure appears to be equally open to doubt".  

• “To compensate for the production decline, Mr Maugeri points to an “increase in reserves”, which are exploitable in mature fields, thanks to technological progress and new investment. He bases this assertion on the rise in American reserves, which he then extrapolates to world reserves. It is true that extraction techniques are improving and a number of investments in older fields are taking place. It is also quite apparent that the increase in American reserves in recent decades is mainly due to statistical legerdemain: the accepted definition of reserves in the United States long permitted the declaration of only reserves in production but not the total extractable resource, in order to protect the interests of investors”.

•  “Mr Maugeri emphasizes the fact that only a third of the sedimentary basins on the Earth have thus far been explored by the petroleum industry. The reason for that is simple: geologists have concluded that they did not present the necessary characteristics to be oil-bearing”. 

• In order to evaluate total recoverable conventional and non-conventional oil reserves, Mr Maugeri relies on the estimates of the U.S. Geological Survey. Their estimate in the year 2000 spoke of around 3500 billion barrels (3500 Gb) of ultimately recoverable reserves of conventional liquid hydrocarbons. This figure is today widely considered to be extremely optimistic. Indeed to date, the discovery of locally important reserves off the coasts of West Africa and Brazil accounts for only a small portion of the gap between that estimate and total discoveries, which today stand at about 2500 Gb. But even ultimately recoverable reserves of 3500 Gb would not be enough to maintain present production beyond 2025-2030”                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

• "Mr Maugeri claims that the present price of oil is far higher than it should be, due to purely political and psychological factors. An analysis published by the International Monetary Fund last May, however, confirms that only constraints on demand caused by stagnating crude oil production since 2005 can explain the price surge we have witnessed since then.”

 Vi kan inte annat än hålla med om Oliver Rechs slutord:

“Som Maugeris rapport vill påskina, finns det ingen oljeproduktionspeak inom sikte, vilket antyder att det inte kommer komma några energibegränsningar på den ekonomiska tillväxten”.  

”I min ögon är detta bara en upprepning av det tragiska misstaget som otaliga oljeimporterande länder redan betalar för med de växande underskotten i handelsbalanserna”.