The Oil Depletion Protocol: An Interview with Richard Heinberg (Ryan McGreal)

Created by : Francis Goodwin View profile

Richard Heinberg discusses the challenges, threats, and opportunities of a world on the brink of irreversible declines in oil production.

By Ryan McGreal -- Raise The Hammer

Feb. 26, 2007 -- These days, Richard Heinberg is an amazingly busy man. In addition to his teaching duties at the New College of California and his ongoing essays and lectures on peak oil, he has been promoting an idea he first heard from Colin Campbell about a simple protocol that he believes will help countries to prepare for, and adjust to, the coming declines in global oil production.

The Oil Depletion Protocol is deceptively simple: oil importing countries reduce their annual imports by the global depletion rate; and oil exporting countries reduce their annual exports by their national depletion rate. That's also the title of his latest book, an in-depth examination of the protocol and its ramifications.

It depends on honest field-by-field oil reserve analysis and open, transparent administration, and it works best if every major oil-producing and -consuming country adopts it, but Heinberg believes it will give every country the best opportunity for making sound decisions based on accurate information and predictable (albeit steadily declining) supplies of oil.

The book itself is a marvel of clarity and economy, packing a detailed analysis of a complex situation into a very readable 151 pages (plus appendices and notes). His calm, lucid style and cant-free delivery take the reader from a grand overview of the framework right down to the methods by which individual communities can plan for the end of cheap, abundant oil.

In his previous books, The Party's Over and Powerdown, Heinberg described the concept of peak oil and explained why you should be concerned about it. In The Oil Depletion Protocol, he offers the closest thing I've seen to a way out. It may well be the most important book you read this year.

Heinberg agreed to an email interview with Raise the Hammer (we first interviewed him back in January 2005) in which he confronted some of the challenges such a Protocol will encounter as its advocates seek to implement it worldwide.

The Interview

Ryan McGreal, Raise the Hammer: Coal is cheap and abundant. Other than the fact that it would increase CO2 production, can countries resist ramping up coal-to-liquids programs to replace declines in conventional oil?

Richard Heinberg: Actually, future global coal production is routinely overestimated. That, at least, is the conclusion of an as yet unpublished study by the Energy Watch Group of Germany.

That team has found that in the countries where coal reserves are well reported, the size of resources has been downgraded dramatically in recent years. There are other countries that have not changed reserves reports for decades, and it appears that those numbers are probably even more inflated than oil reserves numbers for OPEC.

The study concludes that global coal production will peak in 10 to 20 years. I'm tracking a Dutch study-in-progress where the researchers are using different criteria, and their preliminary results confirm the German study.

All of this has enormous implications for the climate debate (which is mostly about coal) as well as discussions about substituting coal-to-liquids for diminishing oil. Ultimately we are facing not just a liquid fuels crisis, but a general energy crisis.

Oil, coal, and natural gas together supply over 85 percent of the world's energy. All will peak in production within the next 20 years. The world had better start thinking about how to get along with less energy.