Mr Wicks seems to be placing great faith in the IEA survey. They would seem to be echoing the methods of CERA, Chris Skrebowski and Rembrandt Koppelaar. The weakness in this approach is the asymmetry between the accuracy of forecasts of growth of new production and decline of old production.

There is plenty of uncertainty in production forecasts. Not only are there geological, meteorological, mechanical and political uncertainties but rapidly rising exploration cost are causing delays in investments. Shell and Exxon have both recently announced delays in investment for financial reasons.  The figure of 17 trillion dollars investment required to meet demand is completely unrealistic as it stands but it is doubtful that even this forecast incorporated  the massive inflation of exploration costs that has been seen since that forecast was made.

However the uncertainty here is small compared with that for  future declines from existing fields. Even the producers themselves have a poor record of forecasts of production but much of production (notably OPEC and Russia) comes from areas that closely guard such forecasts as they have and have very strong incentives to publish over optimistic. The hopeless  forecasts of UK North Sea production should give Mr. Wicks  cause for caution in accepting the findings of the IEA survey.

We should at least welcome the fact that he has taken the bother to reply and has addressed the problem directly even if we believe he has come to the wrong conclusion.   Change will only come about by political action and merely hurling abuse at politicians is unlikely to produce the  desired results. If he has at least seriously considered the problem he may be amenable to evidence and arguments that  may change his mind.