The Oil Drum

There are those among the Peak Oil community who suspect that we could be facing a failure of our interdependent society that may be sudden, profound, and complete. I have repeatedly said that I am not numbered among them. My opinion is that our way of life will have to change significantly, but slowly. I don’t expect to be clubbing anybody with a femur in any foreseeable future. This opinion is on record in both print and electronic media, and I don’t expect to be issuing a retraction any time soon.... but a recent event forced me to admit that I may have to hedge a little.

The following is a guest post about the need for global energy systems modeling, by ASPO-USA co-founder Dick Lawrence. Mr. Lawrence has a degree in Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. After a career at Digital Equipment and Intel he is focusing on the world energy model and starting a solar hot-water business in Massachusetts. In 1986 he read "Beyond Oil" (the original) which was his introduction to resource depletion, Hubbert's peak, and the power of computers to model the behavior of complex systems. In May 2004 he proposed a project to model global energy flow at the ASPO meeting in Berlin.

In the 1980s, Robert Kaufmann co-authored, with 3 others, a study of energy flow through the U.S. economy in Beyond Oil (last updated in 1992). That study was the inspiration for a proposal to model energy flow at the global level, first shown to ASPO members and attendees at the 2004 Berlin conference. After several years of presentations and proposal refinement, a project to model world energy flow is now underway. Modeling teams will develop the North America model (United States, Mexico, and Canada) over the summer of 2007, performing initial model runs in September. They will then expand the scope of the model to the global level, completing development by (approximately) mid-2008.