No. of Recommendations: 11
Publishing the report in all its details is just sharing information.
It is interesting to ponder what they (or, previously, BP, with their very useful energy outlook) hope to achieve by sharing all this information.
If declining demand for oil and gas is the predominant outlook, and if this view is shared in the industry, leading to underinvestment in new sources, and if it turns out that demand for oil and gas holds steady (as Exxon forecasts), then oil and gas producers will have many years of very high profits in front of them. I believe this is the bet that Buffett is making with Chevron and Occidental - that they and much of the rest of the industry are underinvesting in production, so that production levels will fall, and demand will hold steady or at least not fall as quickly as production, leading to high oil and gas prices and high earnings.
Decreasing use of oil and gas is the ardent hope of people concerned about global warming, but these same people often oppose efforts to provide energy from low-carbon sources, predominantly nuclear fission power and wind and solar power, with new transmission lines that would be necessary to hook it all up to the grid and transfer local excesses to where they're needed. They think they can browbeat people into using less energy (other people, not themselves of course), and when this inevitably fails, they will blame the industry for destroying the planet. My guess is that this explains why Exxon publishes this kind of information - they are basically saying that demand for energy IS going to increase, and that, at current rates of non-carbon energy deployment, this will mean increasing combustion of oil and gas, not decreasing. Don't sue us - we are providing something that will still be needed for people not to live in poverty.
For the record, I believe the only way of reducing oil and gas (and coal) consumption is to provide a lot of energy from low-carbon sources, and that means a lot more nuclear/wind/solar. If we provided enough low cost nuclear power, it could lower the price of oil, and that is the only way of making sure some of it is left in the ground. At the moment, these 3 are the only alternatives, and they are too costly to replace coal, oil and gas. Nuclear is too costly because we bury it in red tape; wind and solar are too costly because they are unreliable without storage, and battery storage is still so expensive (probably around 10c/kWh round-trip, it means the total cost of wind/solar+storage is still a long way from competing with fossil fuels. Nuclear power may be feasible in countries with smart regulation (thinking of China), but we are unlikely to get that in most of Europe and America, so I think we will just have to hope that atmospheric CO2 increases don't do as much harm as we fear.
