From the October 9-22, 2006 issue of Canadian Business magazine

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jell Aleklett, a perky and persuasive physicist at Uppsala University, talks with characteristic Swedish candour. As president of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, he jokes that all the big "strawberries" in the world's oilfields have been thoroughly picked over. ("Peak oil" just means the end of cheap oil.) Fifty years ago, the world burned four billion barrels of oil a year and happily discovered lots of big berry patches — 30 billion barrels a year. Today, those figures are exactly reversed, which goes a long way toward explaining volatile oil prices and Sweden's determined plan to get off fossil fuels by 2020. "Money is not running the world," the jaunty global player likes to say during his talks. "Money is used to buy energy." Right.

Aleklett, whose first name (I kid you not) rhymes with Shell, can also be cheeky. Last year, for example, he told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality that the American people — just 5% of the world's population — shouldn't be gobbling up 25% of the world's oil production, because peak oil will probably start to hobble most economies by 2010. Aleklett spelled out another inconvenient truth: since 1900, not one country in the world has increased its GDP without a corresponding increase in oil consumption. He ended his talk by reminding the Yanks that Canada's fabulous and much-lauded oilsands was no lifesaver. Don't count on it, he said.

The Swede, who recently gave his berry-and-oil talk to the international Pulp and Paper Products Council in Vancouver, later backed up his contrarian conclusion with a 46-page report entitled A Crash Program Scenario for the Canadian Oil Sands Industry. The provocative analysis, all based on Canadian industry and government data, looks at the maximum that companies could squeeze out of the tarry sands in the near future, and asks whether this boreal smashing exercise would actually ease prices at global gas pumps.

Here's his answer: Right now, the oilsands produce a little more than a million barrels a day for a global market with an 84-million-barrel-per-day addiction. In the sands, the big berries — just 20% of the resource — consist of a few large open-pit mines, while most of the small berries consist of in situ or steam-the-oil-out-of-the-ground projects. Aleklett and two colleagues concluded that Canadians could shovel and steam a full 3.6 million barrels per day by 2018, but not without self-inducing some bad migraines.

The first headache is natural gas. It takes 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas to produce one barrel of bitumen; the oilsands now consume 4% of the nation's gas supply. Under a crash program, that tally jumps to 16% by 2018, and that would max out the gas market: "The supply of natural gas in North America is not adequate to support a future Canadian oilsands industry with today's dependence on natural gas." If Canada doesn't build nuclear power plants for in situ projects, the place will simply run out of affordable fuel, says Aleklett.

Nor will a crash program in the sands ever make up for the fact that, with the exception of ultra-deep offshore fields, 54 of the world's 65 oil-producing nations have passed peak production. Aleklett doesn't think the sands will even offset "the combined decline from crude oil production of the North Sea and Canada's conventional crude oil production."

At end of the paper, he asked more plucky questions: Given that in situ production exploits small berries but burns energy big-time, how effective will future projects perform in "reservoirs of lower quality"? And is it realistic to include the construction of nuclear facilities into production forecasts?

No one, of course, has a good answer to such Swedish impertinence. In a recent e-mail, Aleklett noted that his report garnered "no response" from industry or the Alberta government. Given that accelerated production won't be a lifesaver for peak oil, I asked Aleklett how the resource should be exploited — a subject of much national debate. Aleklett e-mailed back more common sense: "As the tar sands have a limited influence on peak oil, Canada should try to make the development as environmentally sound as possible." In other words: go slow