{"id":60044,"date":"2023-06-24T08:37:00","date_gmt":"2023-06-24T15:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/energi.media\/?p=60044"},"modified":"2023-06-24T08:37:00","modified_gmt":"2023-06-24T15:37:00","slug":"whose-energy-transition-scenario-is-alberta-listening-to-hint-the-wrong-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/energi.media\/energi-notes\/whose-energy-transition-scenario-is-alberta-listening-to-hint-the-wrong-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Whose energy transition scenario is Alberta listening to? Hint: the wrong one"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Oil people” understand oil industry but not its competitor (electric technologies like solar, wind, batteries, EVs)<\/h2>\n

On Tuesday, the Canadian Energy Regulator (CER) released its long awaited net-zero energy scenarios, which show a steep decline in Canadian oil production by 2050. On Wednesday, an interview with a business professor reminded me that those in the oil and gas business view the world very differently than energy modellers and climate advocates.<\/p>\n

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“The people I talk to in the [oil and gas] industry think the peak’s gonna be around 130 million barrels per day worldwide,” Dr. Bob Schulz,\u00a0Haskayne School of Business, University ofCalgary, said in an interview.<\/strong> “The expectation of most oil people I talk to says 130 million by about 2040.”<\/p>\n

\"FigureProfessor Schulz promised to email the scenario he referenced and I was hardly out of his office before my inbox pinged. His numbers come from Shell’s Sky\/Paris 1.5 scenario, the most climate ambitious, from 2021. That scenario uses data from International Energy Agency reports published in 2020.<\/p>\n

A great deal has changed in the past four years. External shocks to the global energy system – the COVID-19 pandemic that started in early 2020, but especially Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 – accelerating an already accelerating energy transition.<\/p>\n

Still, four years is a short time to invalidate Shell’s scenario, right? Not necessarily. As I explained in this recent column<\/a>, growth of “energy as a technology” (solar, wind, storage, Evs, etc.) is exponential while growth of fossil fuel consumption (coal, oil, gas) has for many decades been linear.<\/p>\n

\"\"“Oil people” think of energy change in linear terms: small annual changes over a long period of time.<\/p>\n

Let’s consider the CER’s take on Canadian oil production in Energy Futures 2023. For the CER modellers, emissions reductions – i.e. clean energy displacing fossil fuels plus increasing energy efficiency – is driven entirely by climate policies. The Current Measures scenario, which already includes some pretty stringent policies around the world, sees Canadian oil supply essentially flat for the next quarter century.<\/p>\n

I think that’s a wrong way of looking at things (in fairness to the modellers, they were asked to create scenarios that focused on policy, so this isn’t a criticism of their work).<\/p>\n