A new online course on the energy transition, designed to give oil-producing jurisdictions like Alberta a more realistic picture of where oil and gas demand is headed, began with one expert’s deep dissatisfaction with an “oil and gas forever world view” that misses the factors driving the shift out of fossil fuels.
The catalyst for the course, signposted as “training for busy professionals…and the rest of us,” was a program at an Alberta university that leaves participants vulnerable to the prospect that fossil fuel demand will crash over the next couple of decades, rather than holding steady or increasing, said energy and climate journalist Markham Hislop of Energi Media.
When Hislop first saw the course, he issued a stern online critique. Then he got to work developing the first in a series of hour-long online segments, each supplemented by four hours of independent reading, that will cover oil and gas futures in Canada and internationally..
“The International Energy Agency (IEA) just said [last week] that we’ve gone through the Age of Coal. We’ve gone through the Age of Oil. Now we’re in the Age of Electricity,” he told The Energy Mix. Yet the other course relies heavily on modelling by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) that shows daily oil demand rising from 103 to 120 million barrels per day by 2050.
IEA analysis, in sharp contrast, has demand for all three fossil fuels peaking and beginning to decline before 2030, with oil falling 50% by 2050 without governments announcing any new policies—to get climate change under control, or to tap into a surging trend toward renewable energy and energy efficiency.
[Disclosure: Energi Media is a publishing partner to The Mix.]
“There are all kinds of problems with the OPEC modelling, with the assumptions behind it,” Hislop said. “And yet [the other program] chose that as the dominant way to explain the energy transition to the 7,000 learners who’ve taken the course so far.”
That approach leaves out “a very, very large body of scholarship, evidence, and data that is rooted in technology adoption theory and practice” that shows clean energy technologies headed toward an “inflection point” over the last 30 or 40 years. Now they’re competitive with fossil fuel technologies “and headed towards beginning to displace hydrocarbons, particularly oil,” severely undercutting the assumption that an earlier era of oil and gas growth will continue.
Starting from that critique, Hislop said the Energi Media course draws on a roster of energy transition experts to explain a rapid global shift driven by manufactured products like solar panels, wind turbines, and heat pumps.
“They’re not dug out of the ground and processed and shipped in a pipeline and refined and then shipped again to the end user,” he explained. “They’re built in a factory and they obey different laws” that drive the drastic cost reductions those technologies are already going through as demand rises and production scales up.
Hislop acknowledged that the new program runs headlong into the way places like Alberta have built their economies, and the way many people who live there see their own economic future.
“The industry has been the foundation of their prosperity now since 1947, over 70 years, and it’s been such a big factor in the economy and in people’s lives,” he said. “So when you criticize oil and gas or you say it’s going to change, it feels like you’re attacking their identity.”
But now the transition is accelerating, and “once it starts, once peak demand hits and then decline starts, there’s no time. We’re out of time.” If the IEA and at least a half-dozen other respected energy modellers are right, that means Alberta has three or four years left to take action,” he said, “and it doesn’t appear that it’s going to.”
Hislop said a media briefing by Premier Danielle Smith at a recent industry conference convinced him that Alberta has no Plan B. “They have doubled down, they’ve basically bet the house, on the OPEC narrative being right,” he said. “The Alberta government is going to bat for the industry, keeping it insulated from federal climate policies and energy policies that impose extra costs. And they’re going to see how it plays out.”
Maybe in the not so far away future, unemployed workers in Alberta will be able to sue the Alberta government for the job losses due to the government ignoring the global movement to a near zero carbon 2050. If the world is still using 100+ Mt of fossil fuels a year in 2050, it will cause a climate disaster, that’s what all the science tells us. At what point do governments bear responsibility for not addressing what is a reasonably predictable situation.