The Oil Drum

After my post about the “The Prize” video there was a short discussion in comments about earlier predictions made by Dr Yergin, and the book “Energy Future - Report of the Energy Project at the Harvard Business School, ” which he co-authored with Robert Stobaugh. Now back when those studies came out I was also trying to read the tea leaves to see what sort of a future our own students would have. At the time coal seemed to get more attention and favor than it now holds, so there is a little more emphasis there. Let me begin with “Energy Future” which begins with an interesting paragraph (given it was written in 1979).

In 1968, the State Department sent the word to foreign governments-American oil production would soon reach the limits of its capacity. Friendly governments needed to know that the cushion of the U.S.’s extra capacity, which could be called into production during an emergency, was about to disappear. The end of an era was at hand.

There were two dramatic oil prices increases in the 1970’s, the first which multiplied the price of oil eight-fold by the end of 1974 over that when the State Department sent out the memo, and the second, which came with the fall of the Shah of Iran some five years later, when the price of oil went up another two-and-a-half times. As a result not only Dr Yergin's collaborative effort editing a second book “Global Insecurity – A Strategy for Energy and Economic Renewal”, (from which the last sentence came) but a significant number of other august bodies also began to produce their own projections. For your amusement I thought you might like to see some of them.