On Monday after the WSJ ran Daniel Yergin’s essay, There Will Be Oil, I submitted this rebuttal.  They ask to have the exclusive right to any submission for 10 days. At this point, they have neither printed it nor responded back, so it seems OK for me to post it here instead.

Saturday, September 17, the WSJ ran an essay by Daniel Yergin called, “There Will Be Oil.” In the essay, Yergin argues that the advocates of “peak oil” theory are wrong. He says, “Meeting future demand will require innovation, investment and the development of more challenging resources,” but he doesn’t make this sound like a huge problem. Most of the big challenges would be above ground issues, like politics, mismanagement of resources, and wars.

Should we believe this story? It sounds strangely dissonant, compared to what we have been hearing from other sources. In 2007, the National Petroleum Council (NPC) issued a report called, “Facing Hard Truths about Energy.” In fact, Daniel Yergin was one of the authors of the report. The cover letter to this report said,

“To meet the accumulating risks, all recommendations of the 2007 report require implementation with increased urgency and commitment. As stated in the 2007 report, there is no single, easy solution to the global challenges ahead. Given the massive scale of the global energy system and the long lead-times necessary to make material changes, all actions must be initiated now and sustained over the long term. We need all economic, environmentally-responsible energy sources to assure adequate, reliable supply.” Continue reading →