Peak Oil Conference at the European Parliament

The Greens/European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament , in collaboration with ASPO Belgium and Peakoil Nederland, organize a conference at the European Parliament, in Brussels, on May 3rd 2011.

The one-day event will address two topics:

A) Peak Oil Evidence and Peak Oil Activities in different EU Member States

The lack of oil supply growth increases since 2005 has led to a sharply rising oil price, which only temporarily reversed due to the severe 2008-2009 economic crisis. This price trend has caused increasing concern over the future availability of oil, as meeting growing oil demand is seen to have become much more difficult. Most of the easy and cheap to produce oil fields have peaked,and increasing production needs to come from expensive deep sea, unconventional oil, and politically difficult to operate in regions. Due to the complexity and uncertainty of oil production constraints, a multitude of viewpoints on how much oil will be available in the coming decades still exist, although in general, perspectives have become much less optimistic. Because of uncertainties, the issue has at large remained unaddressed in political circles.

In this session an overview will be given by four speakers from different EU member states, first on the latest science on Peak Oil including uncertainties that remain, and secondly on what activities are already being undertaken to cope with Peak Oil and high oil prices by companies and policy makers.

B) The EU and Peak Oil – Analyses and Policy Measures

The European Union is currently developing a vision on a low carbon European future to 2050 which will be published in the 3rd quarter of 2011. Such a long term vision warrants a perspective on how the European economy and society can cope with increasingly expensive oil, and to what extent Europe can and will remain dependent on importing oil, to obtain feedstock for chemical production, and fuels for transport in all sectors of the economy. In this session, representatives of the European Commission and members of the European Parliament will debate about Peak Oil issues, and address the question of analyses and policy measures to deal with Peak Oil and rising oil prices.

Programme May 3rd 2011

Speaker Biographies

Prof. Dr. Kjell Aleklett, President of ASPO, is Professor of Physics at Uppsala University, Sweden, and leader of Global Energy Systems research and the Uppsala Hydrocarbon Depletion Study Group. He holds a doctorate degree from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and worked as a post-doctoral staff scientist, 1977-85, at the Natural Science Laboratory at Studsvik, Sweden. In 1986 he was appointed as associated professor at Uppsala University and later as full professor. In 1978-79 and again in 1983, he was invited to work with Nobel Prize winner Glenn T. Seaborg, Lawrence Berkley Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA. His interest in the global energy situation started in 1995 and has since then grown dramatically. In May 2002, he organized the First International Workshop on Oil Depletion at Uppsala University. Since 2003, he is president for ASPO, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas.

Tassos Haniotis, EU Commission, DG AGRI is Director of Economic Analysis, Perspectives and Evaluations at the Directorate General for Agriculture of the European Commission. In previous appointments, he served as member and subsequently Deputy Head of the Cabinet of former European Commissioner for Agriculture Franz Fischler (with respective responsibilities the preparation of the 2003 reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, and the agricultural chapter of the Doha WTO Round and the EU-Mercosur negotiations), as Agricultural Counsellor of the European Commission's Delegation in the United States, and as head of Agricultural Trade Policy Analysis. He holds M.S. (1984) and Ph.D. (1987) degrees in Agricultural Economics from the University of Georgia, USA, and a B.A. (1980) in Economics from the Athens School of Economics and Business Science, in his native Greece. He also spent six months as a visiting Fellow at the Centre for European Agricultural Studies, Wye College, University of London (1988), where he studied EU-US agricultural trade relations in the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations.

Marjeta Jager, Director General Policy, European Commission, DG MOVE. Director at the European Commission since 2005, Marjeta is now responsible for General Policy in Directorate General for Mobility and Transport. Marjeta Jager was previously Deputy Permanent Representative, Minister Plenipotentiary - Coreper I Representative of the Republic of Slovenia to the European Communities (2002-2004), State Under-Secretary in the Cabinet of the Minister of Foreign Affairs (2002), Head of Cabinet of the Slovenian Minister for European Affairs (1999-2002), First Secretary at the Slovenian Mission to the European Communities (1995-1999), Counsellor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia for the relations with the European Union (1991-1995). Ms Jager holds a Bachelor degree in Law and International Law from the University of Ljubljana and is a barrister.

Ir. Philippe Lamberts, member EU Parliament Greens/EFA, co-spokesperson European Green Party, was trained as engineer in applied mathematics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He followed a commercial career for 20 years at IBM, whilst being involved in politics with the Greens. He served for Ecolo (Belgian Green Party) both as a local council member from 1991 to 2003 and as advisor to the cabinet of Isabelle Durant from 1999 to 2003. He has been very active in the European Green Party for over 12 years, starting with his membership of the executive committee of the European Federation of Green Parties in 2002. Since 2006 to today he has been co-President of the European Green Party. In the European Parliament he is serving his first term from 2009 to 2014 as a member of the Greens/EFA Group. As Member of the European Parliament, he focuses on economic questions (fiscal and governance issues in particular), as well as on industrial, research and innovation matters.

Michel Lebrun, Vice-President of the Belgian Walloon Parliament, 1st Vice-President of the EPP at the EU Committee of the Regions, President of the CdH group at the City Council of Viroinval, is a Belgian Francophone Christian-Democrat. He was Minister of the French Community of Belgium in charge of Higher Education, Scientific Research, International Relations, and Youth Support from 1992 to 1995, and Walloon Minister in charge of Territory Planning, Equipment, Transports and Telecommunications from 1995 to 1999. Under the impulsion of Michel Lebrun, the Peak Oil issue has been debated at the Walloon Parliament, and led in 2008 to the vote of a Peak Oil Resolution and the creation of a Parliamentarian Peak Oil and Gas Committee

Jeremy Leggett, Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security, is founder and Executive Chairman of Solarcentury and founder and Chairman of SolarAid, a charity set up by Solarcentury. He is also a founding director of the world's first private equity fund for renewable energy, Bank Sarasin's New Energies Invest AG (2000-present), which was Solarcentury's idea, and in which the company has a stake. He was a member of the UK Government's Renewables Advisory Board from 2002-6. He has worked in the oil industry, among other things researching oil source rocks funded by BP and Shell, and in the environment movement, where he won the US Climate Institute's Award for Advancing Understanding. He has recently been appointed a CNN "Principal Voice," and described by the Observer as "the UK's most respected green energy boss." His critically-acclaimed books The Carbon War and Half Gone cover climate change and peak oil (http://www.carbonwar.co.uk/).

Lord Ron Oxburgh, House of Lords UK Parliament, served as chairman of The Shell Transport and Trading Company until its unification with Royal Dutch Petroleum. He is a member of the House of Lords of the UK Parliament and a graduate of the Universities of Oxford and Princeton. He has taught geology and geophysics at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and was a visiting professor at Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology and Cornell University. From 1988 to 1993, Lord Oxburgh was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Ministry of Defence and, from 1993 to 2001, Rector of Imperial College, London. He is a member of the Advisory Committee on Science, Technology and Research for Singapore, a Fellow of the Royal Society, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Foreign Member of the Australian Academy of Science. He is currently Chairman of Falck Renewables, and an advisor on environment and energy to the Government of Singapore, Climate Change Capital and Deutschebank.

Jan Panek, European Commission, DG ENERGY
Jan Panek is the Head of Unit "Coal and Oil" in the Directorate-General for Energy of the European Commission in Brussels. He joined the European Commission in October 2005 after a diplomatic service at the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs during which he held positions in the Ministry headquarters as well as in Czech diplomatic missions in Tokyo and Brussels. He also spent several years in the 1990s with the Boston Consulting Group in its London and Central European offices. He has a B.Sc. in Applied Geophysics from Charles University in Prague and an M.A. in International Economics and American Foreign Policy from The Johns Hopkins University - SAIS in Washington, D.C. He is also a CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) charterholder.

Claude Turmes, MEP, vice-chair European greens/European Free Alliance, Member of European Parliament Committee on Industry, Research and Energy. Claude Turmes has been a member of the European Parliament since 1999 as a member of Luxembourg's Green Party and the Green Group in the Parliament. Since 1989, he has held various offices in the Luxembourg Ecology Movement and was a member of the Executive Committee of the European Environmental Bureau from 1989-1991. From 1995-1997 he was Secretary of Friends of the Earth Europe. He is Vice-Chairman of the Parliament's Green Group since 2002. Re-elected in 2009, he is member of the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE), substitute member of the Committees on Internal market and Consumer protection (IMCO) and Employment and Social affairs (EMPL). As one of the most active Greens in the Parliament, he was rapporteur on the Renewable Directive in 2008 and shadow rapporteur on the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Directive (IPPC) in 2009.