Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
Well for starters, you can't transition until you have something viable to transition to. Which is why there is no transition right now. Even calling it a transition is preposterous, because we aren't moving from one thing to another; we use more oil than we did ten years ago, and we have nothing to actually replace that energy need. It's like a giant marketing exercise to convince people there's something happening and we can magically move away from fossil fuels, if only there was the political will. It's just not the case.
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Disagree. We are transitioning to lower carbon fuels, and even in Alberta, have been doing it since we decided to leave coal behind. The past few years we have added loads of wind and solar, offsetting carbon fuels. As someone working in the industry, we have transitioned from purely O&G exploration to adding lithium, helium, geothermal, and CCUS because O&G exploration is naturally decreasing. It would have been great to have government support for that transition in a just way, but we did it anyway, because of survival.
So I think you have to have your head in the sand to not see that a transition is happening all around us, whether we like it or not. As the world population grows and economic output increases globally(particularly in the 3rd world) then it makes sense that O&G consumption will increase. Not many are pretending we will abandon it(and those people are foolish) but it is equally foolish to not capitalize on the new industries. What you should be looking at is the percent of energy share, which you will see is decreasing for O&G, even as raw numbers increase. It's an expanding pie, and we should be taking a slice.
O&G will be around for decades to come, but as Albertans, we shouldn't expect our previous industry to return to what it was. It isn't ever going to happen. That means less people drilling, less exploration, and less of everything around that, unless we re-target those efforts to new industries, for which we have expertise.