THE CARBON WAR

Doom, boom, or bust 77
mea culpa speech at Stanford University. It was pointless for oil companies to
argue that climate change wasn’t a grave problem, he said. The evidence was
becoming too clear. BP would henceforth be joining the growing number of
companies wanting to do something meaningful about emissions.
BP’s U-turn galvanised the climate talks for the rest of that year, just at
the right time ahead of the Kyoto climate summit in December, where the
world’s first emissions limitations were finally agreed. I describe this passage
of history in my book published in 1999, The Carbon War.
As BP’s internal discussions raged between advocates of reform and
entrenchment in the run up to Browne’s game-changing speech, I noticed
that the BP executives I debated with in public, and conferred with in private,
looking increasingly uncomfortable with the party line. They knew that, behind
the company’s closed doors, the blocking narrative was eroding. They gave this
away in all sorts of ways.
Now, as then, evidence is becoming increasingly clear all around those
who seek to entrench the incumbency in its old ways. Perhaps most notably, as
they seek to justify their own performance and downplay the opposition’s, the
oil and gas industry’s tendency for hype is being exposed on an increasingly
regular basis. The most recent example from the American shale is particularly
shocking. The Monterey Shale in California was promoted in a 2011 report by
a supposedly independent consultancy firm working for the US government’s
Energy Information Administration as a huge oil play, with more than 13 billion
barrels of oil recoverable. The release of this conclusion made news headlines
all over the world. Since the estimate meant fully two thirds of all American
shale oil reserves were now in the Monterey Shale, it was the core of the “Saudi
America” mantras pushed by the industry and its cheerleaders at the time.
David Hughes, former Canadian Geological Survey veteran, fellow of
the Post Carbon Institute and member of the Transatlantic Energy Security
Dialogue, began painstaking work to check the estimates the consultancy had
made in the Monterey Shale. He came up with a very much smaller figure for
recoverable oil. On May 21 st , the Energy Information Administration was forced
to agree with him. They let it be known that the reserves estimate for recoverable
Monterey oil needed to be revised down by a somewhat inconvenient 96%.
Let me repeat that, for fear of typos. Ninety-six percent.
This announcement, needless to say, did not make headlines around the
world the way that the original report had.
On top of such revelations, and the billions Shell has written off in shale,
and likely soon to write off in Kashagan, in the Arctic, and in tar sands projects,