“Net Zero” Brain-Washing Complete: Exxon Can Tell The Truth
Imagine if Exxon published these charts before during 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth?
Today — right now — Exxon says, quite clearly, that oil production will either decrease exponentially if we don’t frack, or linearly if we accelerate fracking. Either way, Exxon says — to anyone who reads their charts literally — oil production will decline.
Many people knew it years ago. They have shifted to the question, why do so few people believe it?: Telling others about peak oil.
Interestingly, Exxon has been preparing investor expectations for at least 5 years.
Exxon implied they reached peak oil in a their 2020 report.
What’s different in the 2024 report is they’ve separated “field” oil from “tight” oil, another name for oil that is expensively fracked out of the ground.
Exxon is making clear, even with fracking we can’t continue to produce as much oil as we did in the past.
There are a couple of reasons the public isn’t alarmed.
The public STILL believes “Renewables” like solar and wind will make up for reduced oil production.
In previous reports Exxon played along with that the “renewables” political and industrial greenwashing.
No more.
Exxon isn’t saying we’ll reach “net zero” emissions or we won’t. It isn’t taking a position on renewables.
Exxon’s current position is: we produce petroleum products and this is what we expect to produce in the future. Make of it what you will!
There’s a second reason the public isn’t alarmed. The renewables industry, which spans solar and wind, to EVs and electric heating/cooling, has given the public a (seemingly) petroleum free substitute.
EV owners believe they’re driving around using electricity from solar and wind. They conveniently ignore that most of their car, solar panels and batteries were manufactured using coal in China.
The EV world runs on coal and gas (despite what was promised a decade ago).
For renewable electricity to work we’d need to see a global decline in CO2 emissions and petroleum production replaced by electricity.
The proof is in the data:
Roughly, for every new kilowatt of solar electricity, another is added from the extraction and burning of gas — not to mention, again, the coal burned to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines and batteries.
The fuel industry is providing growing amounts of gas, to generate electricity, which becomes as a substitute for oil (and coal).
Yet gas is also facing downward pressure in the amount that can be extracted.
However, when it comes to gas, Exxon is NOT exaggerating the decline because it is investing heavily in gas production and LNG transportation. Everyone with gas reserves is pumping it out of the ground as fast as humanly possible.
We know this because of Exxon’s chart that projects production 27 years out. It says LNG exports will double. (contrary to its chart a few pages above it!)
You tell me how to read Exxon’s LNG projections.
So where are we?
Exxon is telling the truth about oil but is playing into the fantasy that because gas might see us through another 27 years it will last forever!
Solar and wind will never meet demand so we have to burn more gas (a lot more!) in the meantime.
Retail solar panels, batteries and EVs continue to be a resiliency option for the wealthy.
The wealth gap will continue to expand leading to nothing warm and fuzzy — if history is any guide.
As those with internal combustion-engine carriages marked the wealthy in the 1930s, EVs do the same today.
There will be a micro wealth gap between citizens with gas-powered EVs and household solar/batteries in any given country, and a macro gap between countries with access — or not! — to coal, oil and gas.
If you believe any of this, then recent political slash-and-fire policies will make sense. The decades of economic growth based on increasing supplies of oil and gas are over.
We don’t need Federal agencies anymore because there is no growth to spread around.
Again, I didn’t say it. Exxon said it!
Wealth will be measured in one’s allocation of resource ownership, or the military and political control of the technology that manages and protects it. There are countless moving parts. I have no idea how everything will change.
But change it will. Everything.
Unless…
There are large deposits in Venezuela and Russia. If geopolitical and technological conditions become favorable they could have a big impact on supply in the decades ahead.
New technologies could create a 3rd revolution in oil mining (I know of none on the horizon).
There could be huge advances in electrical power storage.
Some virus, or nuclear war, could wipe out huge numbers of people reducing consumption significantly.
We’ll just have to see.
Finally, I haven’t even factored in the effects of other resource depletion, pollution or climate change!
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Alice Friedmann’s blog EnergySkeptic is literally a treasure trove of analysis and discussions around energy and all related subjects.
