In a recent article titled End of oil? Jean-Marc Jancovici next to the plateOpinion revealed that, according to the latest calculations from the International Energy Agency, far from approaching a shortage of black gold, the world was moving towards an oil production surplus by 2030. However, this should still be the case in… 150 years!
This is indeed the conclusion that we can draw from incredible news, which has nevertheless gone relatively unnoticed in France: Russia has discovered an oil deposit under the Antarctic estimated at 511 billion barrels…
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The figure may seem abstract. Let’s put it into perspective. Today, the world consumes 100 million barrels per day. Or 3.65 billion barrels per year. 511 billion barrels correspond to 140 years of current consumption… To which we must of course add what remains of the deposits currently exploited.
Analysts commented on the news from two angles. From a geopolitical point of view, this is very bad news because this deposit will be an additional source of tension in a world that did not need it. Bad ecological news too. Firstly because Antarctica is until now considered a sanctuary continent. Bad news also of course for the climate: such an oil deposit will not encourage a move away from fossil fuels…
The discovery of the Arctic deposit invalidates the first part of the proposition: no, we are not going to run out of oil. So our world cannot collapse due to “running out of fuel”. And the whole challenge of the energy transition is to invalidate the second part of the proposal: to prove that we can deploy a carbon-free energy mix capable of replacing fossil fuels.
Exhaustion. And yet, from a prospective point of view, we must qualify. This news is indeed enough to radically change our vision of the future. And not just for the worse. Because it invalidates the “peak oil” thesis. The expression designates the moment when the exhaustion of black gold leads its production to plateau before decreasing. It finds its origins in the work of geologist Marion K. Hubbert who announced, in 1956, that the peak of American conventional oil would occur between 1965 and 1970. Extraordinary prescience from Hubbert since American production of conventional oil began to decline in 1970.
The peak oil thesis has been established as the basis of environmentalism and collapse theories for more than fifty years. The idea is this: we are going to run out of oil and no amount of energy can ever replace it. Thermo-industrial civilization, born from the exploitation of fossil fuels, is therefore doomed to disappear with the latter. In the popular imagination, it is the scenario of Mad Max.
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The discovery of the Arctic deposit invalidates the first part of the proposition: no, we are not going to run out of oil. So our world cannot collapse due to “running out of fuel”. And the whole challenge of the energy transition is to invalidate the second part of the proposal: to prove that we can deploy a carbon-free energy mix capable of replacing fossil fuels.
Ruling out the scenario of running out of fuel is rather good news. Especially since, even in a low-carbon world, we will still need oil for a long time to come for non-substitutable uses. For the record, even aspirin is made from oil… Moreover, in quantitative terms, the explosion of exploitable oil reserves does not change anything about the climate problem. Before it, we already had enough fossil fuels to cause cataclysmic warming.
On the other hand, this means that the energy transition will not be imposed on us by geophysical constraints. It only depends on us. Since peak oil will not occur, our responsibility is total.
Antoine Buéno is advisor to the Senate, essayist and lecturer.
