“Oil/gas professionals are NOT energy transition experts”… Really? – Watts Up With That?

Guest “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” by David Middleton

The video is mind-numbing. It’s just a closeup of Journalist Markham Hislop droning on and on about oil & gas professionals not being qualified to discuss the energy transition because they aren’t experts in energy transitions. Guess what Markham? Journalists aren’t experts in anything, with the occasional exception of journalism..

Regarding the energy transition (or lack thereof): You don’t need to be an “energy transition expert” or even an “oil and gas professional”… You just need to know how to download data and use Excel.

Let’s zero in on fossil fuels and renewables:

Figures 1 and 2 are modified versions of graphs I used in this July 4 post: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that” there is no energy transition! I was inspired to convert quadrillion Btu to something more American by this comment:

As an oil & gas professional, I don’t know why I never thought to do this before. 100 quadrillion Btu might as well be eleventy gazillion joules under the sea… It’s an unrelatable quantity. Now, 16 billion barrels of oil (or BOE) is something I can wrap my head around!

To the extent that there has been an energy transition, it was from renewables to fossil fuels. It occurred very rapidly from 1860 to 1920.

Here’s the full transcript of the video. I guessed at the paragraph breaks and I did not correct spelling errors or edit out the Uh’s and Um’s:

Today I want to talk about a pet peeve of mine. This has bothered me for years and years and years and that is oil and gas professionals who think and claim to be experts on the energy transition.

Now just because you’ve got ex expertise in the oil and gas industry which is basically uh extracting and transporting molecules to you know uh refineries or to natural gas plants or whatever it is. uh that that somehow that makes you an expert on all things energy. Well, I’m here to that is not the case.

And I’m going to illustrate my point with the dispute that I got into last uh last August with uh some folks who put together a course at the University of Alberta. So, somebody sent me a link to this course and it was on the energy transition and they said, you know, take a look check it out uh because we do a lot of energy transition work and reporting here at uh at Energy Media. So I did and I wrote a column and I said this course absolutely stinks. It’s terrible and the instructor uh who shall go unnamed to protect the guilty is not qualified to do it. And so the reason the ar here’s the argument though.

Uh this course posited that there’s only two ways of looking at the energy system. The one is sort of the oil and gas forever the OPEC view which is you know oil and gas is going to be around forever. or the global south is going to increase uh consumption and whatever new energy sources uh are added like wind and solar uh it’ll be added to not it won’t displace existing uh energy from oil gas and primarily and from coal as well I guess and then the other worldview is climate change which is basically the world is you know the environmental groups climate groups argue this the the world is burning up we need to phase out oil and gas, switch to renewable energy and and uh and do away with it.

So, and so the course basically argued that no, what we really need to do, what the energy transition means is decarbonizing oil and gas, reducing the emissions, eliminating the emissions from the production of oil and gas. Not the consumption, not the the actual combustion say of of gasoline in a internal combustion engine, which is where 80% of the emissions are produced. It’s decarbonizing the production of these of those molecules. And what they’ve what their cardinal sin here and I made this really clear in the column is that there is a third way of looking at the world and that is that uh electricity produced now primarily from a variety of sources uh wind solar hydro nuclear advanced geothermal all sorts of things. Uh and also coal and and natural gas when that’ll be that’ll take years before decades before we get rid of those entirely. But primarily you create electricity and then you have a whole new set of new technologies that turn that energy into work. So instead of an internal combustion engine, you have an electric uh vehicle motor. Uh instead of a gasoline tank, you’ve got a battery. Instead of a gas furnace in your house, you’ve got a a heat pump. Instead of a you know, that sort of thing. And and that’s a completely different way of looking at it. It’s the and in fact if you step outside of North America if you you know we interview experts in Europe and Asia and and that is the dominant way of looking at the energy transition. It’s very much an electrification of the of the global economy on both the supply side.

So you’re you’re you’re increasing the amount of electricity that’s gets produced in the power grid or or you know on your rooftop solar whatever and also adoption of new technologies like electric vehicles like battery storage like heat pumps.

Okay. So that’s those are the I would argue that there are only two real worldviews here. One is continue what the way we we’re going uh just add more energy sources or electricity and electric demand devices technologies will replace the commodities oil, gas and coal and the devices like internal combustion engines that turn that commodity into energy and into work.

Okay. So I wrote the column and the organizers of the course, one of them in particular was outraged, absolutely outraged, tore me a new one on on LinkedIn and said very very rude things and also and this is the key part of this is that complained to by basically by tagging me them in in the the LinkedIn post uh tagged our one of our our funders. We have two and this is one of the large uh foundations in in Canada because they were tagged was public. They felt obligated to check it out. Check out the accusation that I didn’t know, you know, that I had somehow impuged the integrity of this course and of the instructor. So they sent one of their staff, the foundation did sent one of their staff to take the course and they did that, reported back to the board and what did they say? Markham is correct. Markhamm got it absolutely right. That that’s exactly it. In fact, they kind of had a good chuckle over it. And and so here’s my point. I is that these guys, they don’t even know when they’re wrong. And when it’s pointed out to them that they’re wrong, they simply go and don’t listen to you and get all affronted. and and if you see them on social media, if you run into them uh in uh in real life, they’re absolutely sure that they’re correct. It’s Dunning Krueger.

If you’re an oil and gas engineer, for example, what do you know about electricity generation in China and the manufacturing of batteries, electric vehicles, and heat pumps or how efficient they are or what the cost is or how fast if you don’t look at the data, you don’t know. And these guys never look at the data. It’s astonishing to me that so many of them, and I’ll point out Brett Wilson as one example, because he comments all the time on social media, in fact, on my Facebook threads all the time, and he says, “No, you’re wrong.” Well, where’s the data, Brett? Well, he hasn’t got any because all he just It’s the It’s the sure he’s absolutely sure that he’s right even though he’s absolutely wrong. And this goes on on and on and on again. And it’s and so uh I want to make the point here that when you’re reading something or you’re engaged in conversation uh in social media or maybe you’re around the the dinner table, you’re in in Calgary or Edmonton or someplace and you have family that works in the oil industry and they will say with absolute certainty, look, I work in the I work in the energy industry. I know these things. No, they don’t. They absolutely don’t. I I talk to policy makers. I talk to people in the industry. I interview them. I have conversations with them. Uh, you know, sort of off camera. None of them know any of the data. None of them do any of the work and the research to educate themselves on what’s going on outside of North America. It’s quite criminal. And these are the people who are setting Alberta oil and gas policy, energy policy. Some of them are having a tremendous influence at the federal level. and they don’t know. They don’t the the emails I get late at night from people who run oil companies or make policy in Alberta would curl your toes. They are they’re that devoid of of evidence and and and information.

So, if there’s anything you take, there’s one I want to hammer this home over and over and over again, and that is oil and gas professionals aren’t energy transition experts.

Energi Media

If I understood the transcript, he seems to think that oil & gas professionals aren’t energy transition experts because we think we will keep adding new sources of energy on top ot legacy sources. He seems to think that we are replacing fossil fuels with electricity.

Well… Neither Bjorn Lomborg, nor Vaclav Smil are oil and gas professionals and it looks like they disagree with Journalist Markham Hislop …

Just remember: Life is Good!

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