Quand la production mondiale de pétrole atteindra son maximum, le « Pic Pétrolier, » l’économie va probablement entrer en récession en rapport direct avec le déclin de l’approvisionnement en carburants, affirme le Dr. Robert Hirsch, spécialiste de l’énergie et auteur, à la demande du gouvernement américain, d’un rapport sur ce sujet.

Le Dr. Hirsch est l’auteur d’un rapport célèbre, rédigé en 2005 pour le ministère US de l’énergie, qui a mis en lumière les délais très long et les difficultés qui seront inhérentes à la mise en place de solutions techniques au problème du Peak Oil, au delà de la question de l’approvisionnement.

Lors de sa dernière intervention à la conférence de l’Association pour l’Etude du Pic Pétrolier à Houston, il a averti qu’à l’approche du Pic, les pays producteurs de pétrole, incluant ceux de l’OPEP et la Russie, seront certainement tentés de préserver leurs réserves pour les générations futures en limitant leurs exportations, ce qui renforcerait potentiellement le déclin de l’approvisionnement des pays importateurs.

Dans une interview accordée au journaliste David Strahan, auteur de Last Oil Shock, en marge de la conférence de Houston, il développe l’argument selon lequel le rationnement de l’essence prendra une part essentielle dans toute réponse politique, et prédit que de telles mesures seraient prises aux Etats-Unis.

Voici une transcription de cet entretien, établie par Dominique Larchey-Wendling.

Robert Hirsh répond à David Strahan, Last Oil Shock, 18 octobre 2007

David Strahan : Robert Hirsch, thanks for talking to me, you have just made a presentation at the ASPO conference in Huston on the basis of your latest paper which is called "World oil shortage scenarios for mitigation planing" and you have come up with some interesting stuff on the relationship between the oil supply and economic growth. Just tell me a little bit about that.

Robert Hirsch : Oil, it has been said many times, is the lifeblood of modern economies and the question is, when peaking, the maximum of oil production occurs and we begin to go into decline, what impact is that likely to have on world GDP ? It is very difficult to calculate something like that. Economists don’t do it correctly because they simply deal with oil price. Oil price will clearly go up when oil is in shortage but the thing that the economists can’t deal with and one can only approximate is what will happen when actual shortages occur along with very high prices and so what I did was to go back to a number of estimates that people have made as well as what actually happened in 1973 and 1979 when we had real shortages. We have had oil price run ups at other times but those where the two times we had oil shortages. If one looks then at various estimates plus what actually happened, one determines that the percent decline in oil availability is likely to be approximately equal to the percent decline in world GDP. So then if one calculates a range of 2 to 5 percent, some people think the number may be larger, 2 to 5 percent per year increase in oil shortage, one comes up with a rather disastrous indication world GDP will decline by 2 to 5 percent a year in tandem with increasing oil shortages.

David Strahan : That’s a very dramatic conclusion because I think most economists and most economic studies would suggest that there is a rather less than unity relationship between the oil supply and economic growth. I think most of the numbers are something of the order of 0.5 percent. Why are you so convinced that actually the relationship is much stronger and much more significant than that.

Robert Hirsch : I think the available information indicates that this number is approximately correct. It is not precise because precision is impossible. You will know after we see what happens what the number actually turns out to be but I think it is relatively clear that a ratio of a 10th or 10, a 10th would be to small and a ratio of 10 would be too large. So the order of unity is roughly what it is likely to be and if that ends up being 2 or 1/2, that is essentially the same thing. That is still unity.

David Strahan : So what you really saying is that peak oil means peak economy ?

Robert Hirsch : When oil goes into decline yes. World GDP will decline, I am perfectly convinced of that. In talking to economists, they believe very much in their models and their models are econometric so they don’t deal directly with shortage, they deal with oil price and their models can handle oil prices changing relatively slowly but to a person, economist that I have talked to and I have talked to a number of very significant economists, they admit that their models cannot handle significant changes, rapid changes, shock changes, and that is what peak oil is likely to be.

David Strahan : We come on to the vexed and highly debated question of whether or not we are going to see a sharp oil production peak following by imminent or immediate decline or whether we are going to see some kind of extended plateau and you have also come up with some very interesting observations about the likely behaviour of producer, exporter nations as the peak or the limit of oil supply growth approaches. How important do think that is going to be and what do you think the impact will be ?

Robert Hirsch : I have just completed a study looking at what the shape of oil production maximum — peaking — might look like. And I looked across the data and across history and I have looked at a number of forecasts and so forth. Because it is impossible to know in advance, the position that I took is to define three scenarios.

The best scenario would be a plateau where oil reaches a maximum and stays within a modest range over an extended period of time and a number of forecasters have suggested that that may happen but one sees in the data for all of North America and for Europe plateaus that occurred and lasted for a number of years. So a plateau is indeed possible.

One can also look at other regions that were reasonably well managed and relatively free market developed and see a sharp peak, something where you can’t see the peak coming and it occurs relatively quickly, which maybe a year or two and then goes into significant decline so that kind of ramp up ramp down is another possibility. That was the second scenario that came out of the study that I did.

The third scenario gets into resource nationalism and here the situation as many people know is that the big oil companies, the international oil companies do not control the majority of oil production in the world. The national oil companies do it. And they have their own particular interests, they want to make money, some of them look for political control, some of them just mismanaged what they got and so forth.

So there is a number of different issues and situations with respect to how oil exporters manage their business. One of the things that it seems to me is that peak oil to many people is not yet real. When it becomes real, I think that a number of oil exporters will stop and think about what they are doing with their resource for the longer term. When peak oil is realised, oil price will increase dramatically so there will have another major windfall, financial windfall. Some of those folks, I think, are very likely to say that they will cut back on their exports in order to husband the resource for a longer period of time for their own country. In fact Mr. Putin in Russia already has said as much.

Other people in the Middle East have made noises that they may do something like that also. It becomes a matter of an individual country deciding what is best for itself versus what is best for the world and individual countries really ought to look out for their own well being which could mean that indeed a number of them decide to hold back on exports for their own purposes and that would mean that peaking would occur earlier than might otherwise be the case, and be much more abrupt. So the decline rates in a situation like that would be I think much larger than one would calculate if one thinks only about the geology.

David Strahan : So I was going to say, although you might say from a strictly geological analysis that yes there is a capacity to maintain a plateau for some time, in fact the behaviour of the producing and exporting nations might turn that into a sharper decline.

Robert Hirsch : I think it is very likely, but again, nobody knows, I don’t know, but that’s the reason for defining three scenarios, the best scenario being a plateau, the second best, the middling case as I call it, would be sharp break and the third case, the worst case, would be oil exporters withholding. And I think for people that plan for mitigation, they really ought to look at all three scenarios.

David Strahan : Let me put a counterargument to you, because it seems to me that the danger of that behaviour, you know, presumably the people who will sue this line of behaviour are perfectly rational. Surely there is no interest in them killing the goose that lays the golden egg. If they do as you suggest and the oil price soars even higher, destroys demand in the West, puts the industrialised world into a deep recession, and then that is surely not in the interest of OPEC and Russia and so forth. In which case, isn’t there as it were a counterbalancing concern that they would have which would them lead to trying to expand their ... or at least maintain their oil production if they have the capacity to do so.

Robert Hirsch : Well, it is a good question, and I think one really doesn’t know except if one looks at history and interprets it at least the way I do. Countries oftentimes have their first allegiance at home and their second allegiance to the world and when peaking occurs, decline rates will be significant from the studies that we have done before, there will be extreme difficulty in a long period of time for people to catch up with the decline rates. In other words, the problem is basically running away from you and so countries that have the resource I think would do well, I am not proposing this, I am just thinking about it from their point of view of self interest, they would do well by husbanding their resource for themselves and the rest of the world is then gonna have a very difficult time while they prosper because they will be making a lot of money for the little bit of oil or the modest amount of oil that they export.

David Strahan : What do you think this is going to mean for what are these days called geopolitical tensions. I mean do you think that this could provoke hostile response in the consuming nations and how serious could that be ?

Robert Hirsch : A lot of people will be extremely unhappy because economies are almost certain to go into decline, people out of work, recession, increasing recession, high interest rates, all kind of difficulties with unemployment and so forth, yes people will be extremely unhappy. The problem with doing anything geopolitically is that we have found from our experience in Iraq, whether you like the Iraq situation or not, one of the experiences in Iraq is that, because oil production is so spread out, there is no way that somebody can conquer and maintain oil production or expand oil production in a foreign country. Militarily, you simply can’t do that. And you may recall that there was an exercise a few year ago in 2005 called "oil shock wave" where they looked at a long term significant terrorist dent in world oil production and they asked the question whether there were any military solutions to that and they concluded that there was nothing practical that can be done. By the way the spokesman for that study was Robert Gates who is the current secretary of defense.

David Strahan : The other thing you talked about in the conference of today was management of demand which was not a feature of your earlier reports into how to mitigate peak oil but you have clearly done some thinking about that. How important do you think that is going to be in mitigating peak oil.

Robert Hirsch : Well in the earlier study and something everyone who thinks rationally about this needs to consider is to cut back on demand by making those devices, machines that consume liquid fuels, more efficient. And the big target there is light duty vehicles, certainly in the United States and around the world and indeed there is a number of things that can be done and should be done and I believe must be done to dramatically increase the fuel efficiency of those vehicles. The problem with doing that is that the scale is so large and it takes under the very best of conditions, crash program conditions, it takes years to begin to produce those much more efficient vehicles and it takes much more that a decade of crash program effort to have a significant dent on demand worldwide. And by the way, when one does that kind of analysis, one is assuming that people will be able to buy the cars that are much more efficient but if lot of people are out of work and you are in a deepening recession, the question is how are people going to buy those much more efficient vehicles. So the other thing that I think has to happen is not associated with what one does physically, more efficient vehicles being something you can do physically, but that is rationing. We have had rationing during the second world war, it was difficult but we made it work, it is something I think every nation that is oil consuming and oil importing nation will have to do. It is easy to say rationing but then it is very difficult to decide how you are going to ration the fuel that you get. There will be priorities like the military, there will be priorities like the farmers, there will be priorities like getting food from the farmers to the processors and to people, and the bottom of the chain will be folks like us that drive to work or drive for convenience purposes and will probably going to get a lot less of what is available.

David Strahan : But this is an extraordinary thought I think in the American political context. I know that this idea is being looked at very actively for example by the new coalition government in Ireland but can you really see a situation in which rationing is introduced into the United States.

Robert Hirsch : Absolutely yes. One can’t predict in advance what the political processes will be. Politically it turns out from recent activities that I think we find that a number of politicians are very superficial understanding of energy. So there is going to be mistakes that get made but I think there is no avoiding rationing. One of the things that people fell back at in the past was setting a price cap on fuel and what that did is that it drove oil to other countries. And the result of that was that the problem was much worse. Politically, undoubtedly, there will be a lot of pressure for congressmen and the president to settle a cap but if they do it, it will be absolutely disastrous. Rationing is much more reasonable and workable.

David Strahan : I agree with that point but I am just thinking if American politicians find it impossible to tax fuel at a meaningful level, you know, anything even approaching the European level, how on earth are they going to do this which is a really really radical solution ?

Robert Hirsch : Well your question is a very good one. Taxes have been brought up from time to time, they do make good sense, they were implemented a long time ago in Europe, and the result is that European countries were better able to adjust to these rising prices than in the United States although we haven’t done that badly. Taxing is not something that most constituents, most of the public, like. On the other hand, people bring up taxes when there is no pain. When there is a lot of pain, the chances of increasing taxes, when everything else is very difficult, I think is essentially impossible. But I think rationing is something that as much as people won’t like it, I think they will accept it.

David Strahan : To sum up, do you think there is any chance of mitigating peak oil without some kind of rationing of fuel ?

Robert Hirsch : I can’t conceive of anything but rationing will be one of the solutions to the problem.

Lire Aussi :

  Robert Hirsch Peaking of World Oil Production : Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management, fevrier 2005 (pdf), rapport rédigé à la demande du ministère de l’Energie des USA.
  Robert Hirsch The Inevitable Peaking of World Oil Production (pdf), résumé du rapport ci-dessus.

« The era of plentiful, low-cost petroleum is approaching an end. The good news is that commercially viable mitigation options are ready for implementation. The bad news is that unless mitigation is orchestrated on a timely basis, the economic damage to the world economy will be dire and long-lasting ».

  William Clark C’est bien l’énergie et l’économie qui sont en jeu (VF)