Peak Oil Conference at the Walloon Parliament
April 26 2011

The Peak Oil and Gas Committee of the Walloon Parliament , in collaboration with ASPO Belgium and Peakoil Nederland, organize a conference at the Walloon Parliament, in Namur, on Tuesday April 26 2011.

The one-day event will address two topics:

A) The role of R&D in addressing the peak oil issue

Peak oil is poorly studied by the scientific community – about 46,000 “climate change” papers but only ~210 “peak oil” papers can be found in the Isiknowledge database – at a moment where studies about impacts and solutions are most needed, as we experience the first effects of a relentless rise of volatility and price in oil markets. This apparent disinterest can be partly explained by the lack of signals from actors outside the scientific community (society, politics, companies,…). As peak oil does not appear as an issue, the incentive to study it is thus absent.

Recently, the Walloon Minister for Environment, Territory planning and Mobility, Philippe Henry, ordered what appears to be one of the first – if not the first– peak oil studies in Belgium, denoting an evolution of the perception in Belgium. To accelerate these changes, the Peak Oil and Gas Committee of the Walloon Parliament has invited representatives from the scientific community to talk about the role for R&D in addressing the effects of peakoil on the economy. As case studies, three university scholars will present their peak oil-related research. Those studies relate to territory planning and geography, i.e. topics that are a priori far from pure energy matters, which highlights the fact that peak oil has multiple facets that must be tackled by very different research disciplines

B) Finance and peak oil

In 2009, many energy projects were canceled or postponed due to a lack of financing, increasing economic uncertainties, and a collapse of the oil price following the financial crisis. This story illustrates that a properly functioning financial sector is critical for deploying solutions in the energy sector. At the same time, the peaking of oil production is expected to lead to energy price shocks that can destabilize the financial sector, notably via the different sectors of the economy to which the banks loaned. Going through such a feedback loop only a couple of times could be enough to generate profound consequences for the economy and society.

To analyze how the financial sector can address peak oil, the Peak Oil and Gas Committee of the Walloon Parliament has invited economists and representatives from the financial sector to discuss the issue.

Programme Tuesday April 26 2011

The presentations and discussions will be in French an/or English. The language used by the speakers is indicated by the corresponding flag.

09:30 - 09:45	Welcome Remarks Ms. Emily Hoyos, President of the Walloon Parliament
09:45 - 10:00	Introduction Mr. Michel Lebrun, President of the "Peak Oil & Gas Committee" of the Walloon Parliament
What role for R&D in solving the peak oil issue?		Language used
10:00 - 10:30	How to valorise research on the effects of peak oil for urban planning? Susan Krumdieck, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
10:30 - 11:00	An analysis of the peak oil effects for the Walloon territory Thierry Bréchet, UCL, Belgium
11:00 - 11:30	Q&A - discussion
10:30 - 11:45	Coffee Break
11:45 - 12:15	Debating Scarcity: critical social science meets peak oil Gavin Bridge, The University of Manchester, UK
12:15 - 12:45	Q&A - discussion
12:45 - 14:15	Lunch
Peakoil and Finance
14:15 - 14:45	Is Growth Sustainable with Triple Digit Oil Prices? Jeff Rubin, Author, former Chief Economist Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
14:45 - 15:00	Q&A - discussion
15:00 - 15:30	Potential Impacts of Peak Oil on Financial Markets Erik Townsend, former CEO of The Cushing Group, Private investor
15:30 - 15:45	Q&A - discussion
15:45 - 16:00	Conclusions

Speaker Biographies

Dr. Susan Krumdieck, Director, Advanced Energy and Material Systems Lab, University of Canterbury

Susan Krumdieck is Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and director of the Advanced Energy and Materials System Lab. She earned Bachelors and Masters degrees from Arizona State University with focus on Control Systems and Energy Systems Engineering. Her first PhD project was in biofuel combustion characterisation. She earned her PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder in advanced materials for thin film energy applications. She is the National President of Engineers for Social Responsibility, was appointed to the Royal Society of New Zealand Energy Panel in 2005, and heads the Transition Engineering firm, EAST Research Consultants Ltd. Susan’s research group works on developing engineering analysis and modelling tools for transition of transport and power systems to greatly reduced fossil fuel demand. She has delivered more than 70 invited keynote and seminar presentations to community groups, councils and professional organisations on future energy transition issues in the last four years. Susan was the convenor of the Signs of Change conference in 2010, guest editor of Energy Policy, and was selected the IET Prestige lecturer for 2010.

Prof. Dr. Thierry Brechet, University Catholique de Louvain

Thierry Bréchet is Professor of Environmental Economics at the University catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium. He holds the Chair Lhoist Berghmans in Environmental Economics and Management. He is also member of the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) and of the Strategic Management Unit, Louvain School of Management, for its research activities. From 1991 to 1993 he held a doctoral grant of the European Commission (DG Research) and worked as an expert for the Commission. From 1993 to 1999 he worked for the Belgian Federal Planning Office in applied economic modeling on unemployment, sectoral growth and environmental issues. In 2000, he received his PhD from the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. Then he worked as a consultant, mainly on projects related to economic development, environmental climate and sustainability issues, before joining the UCL in 2002. His research programme is mainly devoted to the climate and energy issues (climate economics, climate negotiations analyses and integrated assessement modeling), with an emphasis on the analysis of the properties of policy instruments.

Jeff Rubin, Author and Former Chief Economist Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, has been the top-ranked economist in Canadian financial markets for more than a decade. He is best known for his work on global energy markets and has become internationally recognized for his prescient calls on oil prices and their economic impacts. He recently stepped down as Chief Economist at CIBC World Markets in order to devote his time exclusively to speaking and writing on economic issues. His path-breaking book, Why Your World Is About To Get a Whole Lot Smaller, published by Random House, was released simultaneously in Canada, the US and the United Kingdom in May 2009. Jeff Rubin's opinions have been widely reported in the international media including television appearances on ABC, CBS, CNN and CNBC, and front page articles in newspapers such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, Financial Times, BusinessWeek, Newsweek and The Economist.

Erik Townsend, Private Investor

Erik Townsend was a technologist and entrepreneur in the United States during the 1990s tech boom, and is now a private investor based in Hong Kong. In 1991 he founded The Cushing Group, Inc., a niche consultancy that focused exclusively on taking the concepts now known as Service-Oriented Architecture to market. After selling The Cushing Group, Inc. in 1998, he took a few years off to pursue personal interests, then became a private investor. Erik moved to Hong Kong in late 2009, where he now trades futures and manages his own investment portfolio on a full-time basis. Several people have suggested that he should start a hedge fund to express his macro view on Peak Cheap Oil and Erik is presently contemplating just such a venture under the name Fourth Turning Capital. He is also something of a public education activist, and spent several months of 2008 volunteering his time to help Dr. Chris Martenson promote The Crash Course.

Dr. Gavin Bridge, University of Manchester, is Reader in Economic Geography in the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. His research examines the resource access strategies pursued by firms in the mining, oil and gas sectors, and their implications for resource availability and the environment. His work has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, European Commission, British Academy and the National Geographic Society. He is an editor of New Political Economy, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Geoforum. He has convened sessions on peak oil at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, and in July 2010 published a theme issue of Geoforum (41/4) on Geographies of Peak Oil.