Author's note: This is derived from my lecture at the Drillinginfo Energy Disruptors summit.
It’s common today for observers to speculate about how the energy future must look, rather than trying to imagine how it might look. The camp that “proposes” focuses on what governments and bureaucrats could or must force on markets. Meanwhile, imagination is in short supply among the energy punditocracy.
The future that actually unfolds is always shaped by what engineers and entrepreneurs imagine and invent, things that either consume or produce energy. Consider the historical context.
When it comes to energy demand, who in 1919 could have imagined the future that actually unfolded because of technologies only invented a few years before? In the year 1919 there were still roughly as many horses as cars per capita. But 1919 was a full decade into the wildly successful Model T era, and six years after Wright Brothers first flight. A world with far more automobiles and air travel was actually imaginable. But no one at the time foresaw the extent of the energy-consuming road-miles and air-miles to come, now counted in trillions per year.
And, regarding energy production, by 1919 the age of petroleum (which really did save the whales) was already a half-century old; global production had soared over 20-fold from early days. Consequently, 1919 saw the rise of the ‘industry’ of experts predicting peak oil supply. But innovators created a future that would see production rise by over 80-fold from that point. Some of the key technologies that enabled that growth had already been invented by 1919: the Hughes drill bit, patented in 1909, radically accelerated both speed and depth of drilling; the first off-shore platform, opening up vast new territories, had been built 20 years earlier; and scientists were toying with subsurface seismic imaging (1917 saw the first seismograph patent by Canadian Reginald Fessenden) to take the “wild” out of “wildcatters” drilling blindly.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Forbes
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Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering. In 2016, he was named “Energy Writer of the Year” by the American Energy Society. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Forbes