Australia in Today’s World – some observations from former PM John Howard
https://aiiansw.tidyhq.com/public/schedule/events/16630-australia-in-today-s-world-some-observations-from-former-pm-john-howard
John Howard was happy to report that Chinese GDP growth is 6% and that a great future lies ahead for Australia.
In Q&A I asked him:
“Are you aware that Chinese oil production peaked in 2015? Therefore China is now where the US was in 1970 when US production peaked. That was followed by the Nixon shock in which the US cancelled the convertibility of the US$ to gold. In 2016, China’s oil demand growth was around half a million barrels per day. Multiply this by 10 years and where will 5 mb/d come from?”
Here are a couple of graphs which highlight the situation:
Fig 1: China’s oil production
Fig 2: China’s oil demand by fuel
Note that only 24% of fuels (and 18% of growth) is petrol which means electric cars won’t help much.
Fig 3: Asia Pacific oil production vs consumption
The above is my favorite graph to show that there cannot be perpetual growth in the “Asian Century”
Howard’s answer:
“I was never asked this question….from US shale oil I guess”
Let’s have a look at the US crude oil projections from the Energy Information Administration done in January 2017:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
