The Oil Drum

Here in the Netherlands we(ASPO Nl) just published a report on the issue.
Unfortunately the report is in Dutch, we are still looking for some funding to have it translated in English.
For those who want to (try) to read it (PDF!) http://www.peakoil.nl/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/minder_olie_meer_co2_pe...

Our main conclusion was that as peakoil also means a shift to tarsands, heavy oil, CTL, GTL, the net effect of declining fossil fuel production on co2 emissions will be near zero. It could even mean more co2 in the air.
This result is of course strongly influenced by how peak oil will shape climate policy. If peak oil means forgetting about reducing co2 emissions and a strong push for coal and unconventionals, we will almost certainly see more co2. On the other hand, the IPCC scenario's are based on assumptions on fossil fuel productions most people in the industry will see as unrealistic.

The report also deals with the effects of climate change on the fossil fuel industry. For instance the rising change on supply disruption by extreme weather events as floods and hurricanes, the effect of thawing permafrost on oil infrastructure and of course the prospects of oil,- and gasproduction in the arctic.

From 5:10 or so onwards this is discussed by you.

Chris begins by saying that

"I think the current understanding of climate change, the analysis that the IPCC have done with their scenarios, doesn't take into full account the latest thinking on oil reserves and on peak oil."

To be clear, the IPCC does not produce any scenarios at all, but simply reviews and summarises conclusions from scenarios that others have done. Whether among those 177 scenarios are any which consider peak oil (or other fossil fuels) is unclear. However the IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers doesn't mention the issue at all. Their mitigation chapter, where we might expect to find mention of it, doesn't breathe a word - but then, they're speaking of deliberate mitigation strategies.

The assumption of the 177 scenarios reviewed by the IPCC appears to be that we have more than enough stuff to burn, at least to put us in the situation of having 140% more emissions (the number in the most-emitting scenarios) by 2050. This would be 118Gt CO_2e annually by then, if risen to linearly between then and now this would be an average of 84Gt CO_2e over those 42 years. Can we emit that much? Certainly. About 17Gt comes from things nothing to do with fossil fuels - deforestation, rice-farming, CFCs, and so on. If they neither decline nor increase - and in a scenario where we're burning all our fossil fuels, we can't really expect those other contributions to decrease - then we get fossil fuels need only supply 67Gt CO_2e annually. As I note above, this is quite doable for humanity.

So if the scenarios reviewed by the IPCC in its 2007 report ignore peak fossil fuel effects (to know for certain would require a fuller reading of their bibliography than I've done), I think that's fair for them to do so, because the amount we have to burn is far in excess of what's needed to pass key thresholds in the reviewed scenarios, 1,800Gt by 2100, etc.

Chris later says that the "IPCC scenarios" are not based on calculations of fossil fuels reserves. Calculating climate change based on fossil fuel reserves is like a man drinking himself to death in a bar calculating whether he'll die by looking at how much booze is still on the bar shelf; there's plenty, forget about it.

Chris goes on,

So when we look at peak oil, I think we can see that there'll be less CO₂ in the atmosphere... you could say peak oil is good for climate change. There is a problem in that the IPCC scenarios are probably conservative in the effects of CO₂... you could say the IPCC overestimate the amount of the CO₂, but then underestimate the effect. So I don't suggest that peak oil mitigates the climate change problem.

Whether peak oil is good news for climate change or not, to answer that question you need to look at two scenarios: a scenario where peak oil did exist, and a scenario where peak oil didn't exist. If peak oil didn't exist, we're left with the IEA thinking from 2004, which showed oil supply increasing from 84-85 a day, up to 121, 120 million barrels a day in 2030. So that's where we'd be if there was no peak oil.

If you do have a peak oil, as ASPO and others are suggesting, then by 2030, that oil supply could be done to 60 million barrels a day. Now, there are alternatives, there are coal-to-liquids, heavy tar sands, there are biofuels, there are gas-to-liquids, but even when you make an analysis of all these and you add them up, you don't get up to 120 million barrels a day.

So the two scenarios, the peak oil scenario and the no peak oil scenario, whichever way you run the numbers, in 2030 an arbitrary date in the future, there's probably less carbon going into the atmosphere than in the peak oil scenario.

While there's that individual comment that peak oil doesn't mitigate climate change, the following comments contradict that.

If Chris doesn't mean to say that, then some editing needs to be done.

And of course I don't agree that peak oil necessarily gives us less carbon in the atmosphere. It's easy to imagine that in the next decade countries will do largescale conversions to using more coal and natural gas. We could easily have a sort of reverse-ecotechnia, where because of oil price and scarcity governments of the West promote mass transit - powered by electricity from coal and gas-fired plants. Combined with rising demand for electricity across the world, especially in developing countries, we could easily get as much or more carbon in the air with a peak oil scenario as without.

As I noted, in areas where oil is almost entirely unavailable due to peak, we're likely to get increased deforestation, already contributing quite a bit of carbon.