Chris Turner
Canadian David Hughes is a coal man, a geologist, and he always refers to the holy trinity of fossil fuels whose flames have stoked the past 200 years of industrial growth—coal, natural gas, and especially oil—in that same semi-technical way: hydrocarbons. Hughes has a lot to say about hydrocarbons, mainly how there’s no possible way to keep running the engine of a modern global economy for much longer at the pace we’re burning them. Which is why you felt compelled to join him in the black chill of this late-autumn morning. Because that seems like a pretty big deal.
Dave came right to the curb out in front of your house, your personal chauffeur, because you said you were interested in hearing his talk a second time, and he’ll do his level best to bring his talk to just about anyone who asks. The Talk, he usually calls it, and you can tell it has been a proper noun in his head for a good long while now. Somewhere between that first lecture back in 2002 at the University of Calgary and the 155th, the one he’ll give later today at a Natural Resources Canada research facility outside Edmonton, it became his passion, his quiet crusade, his data-freighted inconvenient truth. …
He’s fifty-eight years old, a married man with a grown daughter and three grandkids whose collective future worries him enormously and fuels the quiet urgency of The Talk. He lives for much of the year on Cortes Island, a remote rural idyll at the northern end of the Georgia Strait, off the coast of British Columbia. Not because it’s a survivalist retreat—though you couldn’t help jumping to that conclusion at first—but because when he first laid eyes on the place in 1977 he knew he’d found his own little slice of paradise. He bought it in 1990, when he still toiled for the Geological Survey in Calgary.
His was a quiet government researcher’s life. Then, in 1995, a major Canadian energy company came calling, hoping to figure out how much natural gas might someday be mined from coal bed methane deposits—an “unconventional” gas reserve. This is how Dave learned that the gas industry was worried there wasn’t enough conventional natural gas left in Canada to feed its pipes indefinitely. His research confirmed those suspicions. (In The Talk, Dave now places Canada’s natural gas production plateau between 2001 and 2006; he supports predictions of a global peak of conventional gas reserves by 2027. He is calmly, logically, witheringly dismissive of rosier scenarios involving unconventional reserves.)
Around the same time, Dave stumbled on the work of Colin Campbell. After thirty years as an oil field geologist, unearthing new pools of crude for the likes of Texaco, BP, and Amoco, Campbell had throughout the ’90s been writing in the press and academic journals, with mounting alarm, about the imminent arrival of peak oil—the moment when humanity will have burned half the planet’s oil reserves, after which an economy driven by the stuff will rapidly (and potentially catastrophically) unravel.
First articulated by Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert in 1956, and expanded upon in the years since by Princeton University’s Kenneth Deffeyes, an ever-growing roster of academics and analysts, and even a few rogue oilmen, peak oil theory was still considered a lunatic fringe notion by the mainstream oil and gas business when Dave started reading up on it. As recently as 2005, well into Dave’s second career as a peak-hydrocarbon prophet, the executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA)—probably the most trusted name in fossil fuel reserve prediction—was dismissing peak oil’s proponents as “doomsayers.” Mainstream media coverage, meanwhile, tended to focus on the hard-core survivalist subculture the science had inspired.
Two weeks after you ride along with Dave Hughes for Talk No. 155, though, the IEA releases the latest edition of its annual World Energy Outlook, which predicts a global oil production peak or plateau by 2030. In a video that appears online soon after, the Guardian’s George Monbiot requests a more precise figure from the IEA’s chief economist, Fatih Birol. The official estimate, she confesses, is 2020. Monbiot also inquires as to the motivation for the IEA’s sudden about-face, and Birol explains dryly that previous studies were “mainly an assumption.” That is, the 2008 version was the first in which the IEA actually examined hard data, wellhead by wellhead, from the world’s 800 largest oil fields. Monbiot asks, with understandable incredulity, how it was that such a survey hadn’t been conducted previously. Birol’s response: “In fact, nobody has done that research. And the research we have done this year is the first in the world, and this is the first publicly available data in that respect.”