Between the Lines: Today’s New York Times and Cleantech

Posted on 25 August 2009

Summer vacation season is here and we expect that Times editorial board may be having a hard time getting quality content, which may explain why they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel with “Peak Oil is a Waste of Energy” by Michael Lynch on the op-ed page.

Michael Lynch has been speaking and publishing for years about oil issues and so is not a new voice to those who specialize in the study of oil prospects.  He is also currently a consultant to the oil industry and so it should come as no shock to anyone that he dismisses the concept of “peak oil” with some disdain.

We are surprised that someone with his level of experience couldn’t do a better job debating the issue, though.  For example, he states, “A careful examination of the facts shows that most arguments about peak oil are based on anecdotal information, vague references and ignorance of how the oil industry goes about finding fields and extracting petroleum.”

Peak Oil may be subject to debate but certainly not for those reasons. Lynch’s piece is hardly critical of any real issues nor does it present a scenario under which resource economics increases supply in a world, as his foil Fatih Birol points out, where many of world’s major fields are showing accelerating year over year rates of decline.

At best we get from Lynch the point that, “[a]s the Saudis have proved in recent years at Ghawar, additional investment — to find new deposits and drill new wells — can keep a field’s overall production from falling” before jumping off topic to invoke Joseph Stalin as an example of political risk, presumably implying that such a thing would be manageable, if he were somehow around to influence Russian oil production (which is declining) today. Hardly a careful examination of the facts he promised us.

We’ll leave it to the more focused writers at The Oil Drum to rebut Lynch’s haphazard analysis.  In the meantime, we’ll wait for the Times to find someone to make a better case for the technological leap that brings abundant and cheap oil.