An Inconvenient Talk

A while later, Dave got in touch to tell you he’d be doing the full-length version for his old colleagues at NRCan, up near Edmonton. You should come, he said. So you have.

You’ve learned a few things about Dave in the interim. He’s fifty-eight years old, a married man with a grown daughter and three grandkids whose collective future worries him enormously and fuels the quiet urgency of The Talk. He lives for much of the year on Cortes Island, a remote rural idyll at the northern end of the Georgia Strait, off the coast of British Columbia. Not because it’s a survivalist retreat — though you couldn’t help jumping to that conclusion at first — but because when he first laid eyes on the place in 1977 he knew he’d found his own little slice of paradise. He bought it in 1990, when he still toiled for the Geological Survey in Calgary.

His was a quiet government researcher’s life. Then, in 1995, a major Canadian energy company came calling, hoping to figure out how much natural gas might someday be mined from coal bed methane deposits — an “unconventional” gas reserve. This is how Dave learned that the gas industry was worried there wasn’t enough conventional natural gas left in Canada to feed its pipes indefinitely. His research confirmed those suspicions. (In The Talk, Dave now places Canada’s natural gas production plateau between 2001 and 2006; he supports predictions of a global peak of conventional gas reserves by 2027. He is calmly, logically, witheringly dismissive of rosier scenarios involving unconventional reserves.)

Around the same time, Dave stumbled on the work of Colin Campbell. After thirty years as an oil field geologist, unearthing new pools of crude for the likes of Texaco, BP, and Amoco, Campbell had throughout the ’90s been writing in the press and academic journals, with mounting alarm, about the imminent arrival of peak oil — the moment when humanity will have burned half the planet’s oil reserves, after which an economy driven by the stuff will rapidly (and potentially catastrophically) unravel.

First articulated by Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert in 1956, and expanded upon in the years since by Princeton University’s Kenneth Deffeyes, an ever-growing roster of academics and analysts, and even a few rogue oilmen, peak oil theory was still considered a lunatic fringe notion by the mainstream oil and gas business when Dave started reading up on it. As recently as 2005, well into Dave’s second career as a peak-hydrocarbon prophet, the executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) — probably the most trusted name in fossil fuel reserve prediction — was dismissing peak oil’s proponents as “doomsayers.” Mainstream media coverage, meanwhile, tended to focus on the hard-core survivalist subculture the science had inspired.

Two weeks after you ride along with Dave Hughes for Talk No. 155, though, the IEA releases the latest edition of its annual World Energy Outlook, which predicts a global oil production peak or plateau by 2030. In a video that appears online soon after, the Guardian’s George Monbiot requests a more precise figure from the IEA’s chief economist, Fatih Birol. The official estimate, he confesses, is 2020. Monbiot also inquires as to the motivation for the IEA’s sudden about-face, and Birol explains dryly that previous studies were “mainly an assumption.” That is, the 2008 version was the first in which the IEA actually examined hard data, wellhead by wellhead, from the world’s 800 largest oil fields. Monbiot asks, with understandable incredulity, how it was that such a survey hadn’t been conducted previously. Birol’s response: “In fact, nobody has done that research. And the research we have done this year is the first in the world, and this is the first publicly available data in that respect.”

This will come back to you again and again as you follow Dave farther down the road he’s travelled. Like the first oil executive’s public confirmation of the scientific reality of climate change (Lord Browne, BP, 1997), it is a pivotal declaration, an irreversible shift of the centre of balance from one side of the fulcrum to the other.

Dave’s been over on that reality-based side, publicly at least, since 2002, when the University of Calgary’s business school invited him to present his research on the growing scarcity of fossil fuels to its regular luncheon speakers series. This was Talk No. 1. Word spread, each Talk spawning another, and Dave was soon criss-crossing the continent.

And now he is behind the wheel of his new Toyota Tacoma four-by-four (you can tell he’s pretty pleased with it — it’s a backwoods Cortes Island kind of vehicle, rugged but reasonably efficient), and he’s turning off Highway 2 under a blinding prairie sun. He drives down a couple of those arrow-straight central Alberta secondary highways, and you come eventually to a low-slung office park on the outskirts of a town called Devon. This is NRCan’s National Centre for Upgrading Technology, a place where lab rats in long coats and hard hats work in vaulted warehouse spaces crammed with piles of pipe-and-valve apparatus straight out of a Dr. Seuss illustration, all of it intended to make it easier to turn unconventional fossil fuels into conventional ones. After Dave arrives, a swath of the centre’s staff gathers in a cramped, airless meeting space the size of a high school classroom, and Talk No. 155 begins.

What strikes you right away, this second time around, is how the data seems even more flooring. Ninety percent of all the oil humanity has ever burned has turned to ash and greenhouse gases since 1959 — half since 1986. Ninety percent of all the natural gas ever burned set aflame since 1964. Half of humanity’s cumulative coal tally up in smoke since 1972. “When I was born, back in 1950” — this is Dave, summarizing in his flat, slightly clipped deadpan — “the world had 95 percent of ultimate recoverable hydrocarbons remaining. Today we’ve consumed about 40 percent of ultimate recoverable hydrocarbons. If we keep consuming them as fast as we can produce them, 80 percent will be gone by 2050. And that’s a huge concern for future generations.” This presumes, of course, that what remains after we reach 50 percent — the global hydrocarbon peak — can even continue to be extracted at speeds and volumes that make any kind of economic sense.