Snipped from The Newsletter from Thomas P.M. Barnett, 2 May 2005
Received April 24, 2005
Winfred asks,
After the last email I caught up with the view from Peter Huber's3 head essentially via The Bottomless Well4 . That made me think that my question to you about the oil demand/supply effect on global stability was sophomoric.
However, it may not be that clear cut. I don't know enough to doubt Huber's assertion that for all practical purposes humanity has at its disposal essentially an unlimited supply of energy. He includes that getting energy from the source to the user is within the capability of the human mind. The fly in the ointment is that he seems only to mention in passing that the technology of getting the energy from the source to the user is but a small part of the process. In my mind, the significant variable stated over-simply is "politics and social structure."
In other words, based in part on trend analysis, the question may still be valid if thought of as a relative decreasing availability of energy. Or, "What effect will an increasing energy crunch have on global stability?"
Tom replies to Winfred:
Hubbert's Curve5 is real and applies to Core areas where oil supplies have been exploited to death. It does not apply in Gap where National Oil Companies (NOCs) rule the reserves6. We simply haven't explored most of the Gap. It's that simple, really.
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3 Peter W. Huber at www.phuber.com
4 Amazon link to The Bottomless Well
5 ìIn 1953 King Hubbert made a mathematical prediction of when oil production in the U.S. would peak. His model predicted production would peak in 1970 which was only wrong by one year. The model assumes production will increase until some maximum value and then decrease as consumption uses up the reserve forming a bell shaped curve. This kind of modeling can be done with any resource which has a fixed reserve (no new sources are found).î Full text at physics.ius.edu/~kyle/E/Reserves.html#hubbert
6 NOCs control 60% of production but control close to 90% of reserves. Full text at www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/archives2/000670.html