Following Oceana’s recently published report , Quest Offshore Resources, Inc. has issued a response stating that Oceana presented its work in an inaccurate way. The following is the summary of the response:
In the energy industry there is a tendency to present the future of energy production as an “either or” situation. Many think of specific energy sources as the only possible solution to the future of energy production while ignoring the realities of a large and complicated industry.
Oceana’s “Offshore Energy by the Numbers” had some unfortunate mistakes in regard to our assumptions, math and estimation methods that present our work in an inaccurate way. First and most importantly, our development scheme was presented as being overly aggressive with reserve sizes, the portion of those reserves which the industry would be able to produce and the number of jobs that would be sustained by oil and gas production.
In addition to those mistakes there were also misunderstandings regarding the lifetimes of offshore projects, the offshore regulatory environment, our language around any potential revenue sharing agreements between the federal and state governments, and the reasoning behind our distribution of jobs outside of just the coastal states.
In response to Oceana’s claims, we would like to make the following statements about our study:
While our primary intent in this response was to clarify the misunderstandings involving our work, we feel it is necessary to also point out several of the issues in Oceana’s study:
A combination of the current energy sources with responsible, reliable and sustainable clean energy is already under way and will likely continue to grow as a share of power generation as advances in technology allow it. However, it is unlikely that there will be a situation where these energy sources can meet all of our energy needs in the near future, and they will never be able to meet all of the chemical needs which are currently satisfied by petroleum products.
As the industry currently stands, in order to make renewable energy work, production sources need to be combined with power generation that can be easily turned on and off in order to cover the gaps of unpredictable energy generation by renewable energy resources.
Full response can be found on Quest Offshore’s website.