IEA Oil Outlook 2010 and beyond

I read it too and they are "predicting" a huge amount of coal to liquids, esp. from China, which they NOW categorize as "non OPEC" liguids. And because of this slight of hand, they can say combined conventional and crude will "plateau" not "peak".
Last year's report from these guys was packed full of lies and said world production would slowly increase from 95 MBD to 145 MBD.
This year's report is a mess of obfuscation and beating around the bush, but at the heart of it, buried in the BS, they are admitting that crude production will peak in a couple of years if it hasn't already.
But their still afraid to sound the alarm bells, so they try to soften the news in the report.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Darwood @ Jul 10 2007, 03:27 PM) [snapback]476286[/snapback]</div>

I'd have put it differently but that's basically my take as well. It's not purely a technical document, I think that's a fair statement. Consider the internal thrashing they must have gone through even to say "plateau".

Oddly, and only mildly off-topic, the word "plateau" is notorious among economists due to an event that happened just prior to the 1929 stock market crash. Rather than admit that stock valulations were absurd, and likely to decline, a (then) world-famous Harvard professor (Irving Fisher) stated that stock values had reached "a permanently high plateau". That was, I think, about a week before the crash. His reputation never recovered.

What I'm saying is that when you've put a large bet on ever-rising (fill-in-the-blank), and it becomes pretty clearly that the rise has stopped, and is in all likelihood going to decline, well, "plateau" is a common weasel-word of choice. It admits that the rise has stopped, but doesn't admit to any projected decline. That's a pretty big step considering the source.