PrintOil is a finite resource, so the more of it the world's energy companies extract, the less will remain. On that, everyone agrees. One day, we will reach the mathematical peak of the world's reserves. When that day will be – or if it has already passed – is a question that continues to divide opinion.
"A Crude Awakening" claims to be a documentary about Peak Oil, as the theory is known, and follows the success of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" (2006), another movie for the green generation. In "A Crude Awakening" investigation and exposition of the facts are both casualties of the rhetoric, which seeks to tell us one big thing: the world has reached peak oil and civilization as we know it is about to end. The remaining 83 minutes want to scare viewers into accepting the dark prophecy.
It won't fall on deaf ears. Among the film-watching public, apocalyptic movies about the evils of the energy industry and the threat it poses to our way of life are becoming a genre of their own, complete with their own standard clichés and tropes.
Everyone knows that the US invaded Iraq to control oilfields, that a conspiracy among oil companies is preventing new alternative energies from gaining market share and that the public is being deceived by a cabal of shady policy makers in Houston and Washington DC.
They are all good stories, with grains – or perhaps mountains – of truth in them. So why let the facts get in the way? The inconvenient truth of films like "A Crude Awakening" is that things aren’t quite as simple as their arguments would have us believe.
This movie relies on interviews with several prophetic voices in the energy industry. The most powerful belongs to Matthew Simmons, a venerable investment banker and expert in the technologies oil service companies apply in drilling for crude. Simmons has been the oil industry’s Cassandra for decades. Compared with him, the apocalyptic tenor of Matt Savinar, who runs a website called www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net and is one of the film’s most important voices, sounds frantic. He’s eloquent, but he also seems a touch demented. Unfairly, the film seems to mock him: wearing a green military sweater, he speaks from what looks to be a bunker, with boxed emergency supplies behind his head.
And then there are the deceptions that will be evident only to energy journalists like me who have had the misfortune to travel in parts of the world scarred by oil companies. Images of dilapidation in Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo and Baku, in Azerbaijan, are presented to show how the boom times have gone. Yet both places remain prolific oil producing regions. I’ve been to that oilfield in Baku. It’s ugly and a stain on the city. And it no longer produces much oil. But a few miles away are far more prolific oilfields, all brought on stream recently. Azerbaijan's oil production (654,000 b/d) is now about three times what it was 20 years ago.
A lot of statements go unchallenged, too. Simmons' argument about Saudi reserves, made in his book Twilight in the Desert (2005), was powerful. It said that the kingdom's upstream record had gone into sharp decline and that its largest find, the Ghawar field, was nearing peak and another like it would never be found. The book forced Saudi Arabia to offer the world more data about their reserves. But this film brooks no counter argument to Simmons’s claims and it relies exclusively on one methodology for calculating the depletion of reserves.
As Leo Drollas of the Centre for Global Energy Studies has pointed out, there is a crucial difference between “strict depletion” (the methodology adopted in ‘A Crude Awakening’) and “net depletion”. In the former, you take the reserves and production rate of the field and calculate how long it has left. A 300m barrel field producing at a rate of 50,000 barrels a day will l
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