IEA Now Projects N. American Oil Decline From 2020 On - Too Bad About That "New Saudi Arabia" Thing

NPR’s Business News starts with the outlook for oil. This is a change of course – the International Energy Agency has released a report on global energy investment. And this group predicts the United States will have to rely more heavily on Middle East oil in the coming years, as North American sources start to dry up a little bit. U.S. energy production has boomed recently, much of it coming from oil and gas extracted from shale. But the IEA says U.S. production will start to lose steam around 2020, and that would put more bargaining power back in the hands of OPEC countries, such as Saudi Arabia.

This is quite interesting, given that in 2012, the IEA forecast that the U.S. would overtake Saudia Arabia in oil production by 2020, and would be a net oil exporter by 2030. The International Energy Agency (I.E.A.) is a watchdog organization considered the world’s leading energy analyzing institution. This new stance coincides with a similar about-face from the U.S. government’s EIA (Energy Information Administration), which suddenly downgraded its assessment of the Montery Shale “tight oil” fields by 96%.

Well, that Shale bubble, didn’t last long, did it? As Sylvia says, “we told you so!” One of the best recent analysis of the current energy situation, I believe, was done by Steven Kopits, which I wrote about here. and with a follow-up here.

The focus of the new report released by the IEA today is on how much investment in the energy sector is going to be needed in the next 20 years (World Energy Investment Outlook). The numbers are sobering. They estimate that $48 trillion dollars needs to be invested to meet energy needs…but really it needs to be closer to $53 trillion if we want to address climate change. They don’t even bother talking about a 350 parts per million target, but rather 450 parts per million to limit global warming to 2 degrees C.

EDIT

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-06-04/new-energy-report-from-i-e-a-forecasts-decline-in-north-american-oil-supply