A Forecast Of Domestic Petroleum Demands For The Next Two Decades

Publication Rights Reserved This paper is to be presented at the California Regional Meeting in Los Angeles, Calif., Nov. 5–6, 1964, and is considered the property of the Society of Petroleum Engineers. Permission to publish is hereby restricted to an abstract of not more than 300 words, with no illustrations, unless the paper is specifically released to the press by the Editor of the JOURNAL OF PETROLEUM TECHNOLOGY or SOCIETY OF PETROLEUM ENGINEERS JOURNAL is granted on request, providing proper credit is given that publication and the original presentation of the paper. Discussion of this paper is invited. Three copies of any discussion should be sent to the Society of Petroleum Engineers office. Such discussion may be presented at the above meeting and considered for publication in one of the two SPE magazines with the paper. It is always a genuine pleasure for a Texan to visit in California. This is probably the only state we can visit and feel perfectly at ease with things that are bigger and better than they are at home. Any where a Texan goes outside of California, those who listen to him think he is lying or bragging or exaggerating. In California, no matter what we say, the natives seem to sympathize with our real modesty and our lack of imagination. My assignment here today is to make "A Forecast of Domestic Petroleum Demands for the Next Two Decades". In order to do this, I certainly will have to forego any of my modesty and use all of my imagination. Forecasting demand is, to say the least, an unusual role for an oil finder and explorer. I certainly cannot qualify as a petroleum economist. With the exception of very short-term forecasts, no one has ever made accurate predictions of domestic petroleum demands in the past. Therefore, it is appropriate to assume that this forecast will not be any more accurate than those made in the past. In recent years, long-term supply and demand forecasts have broken out like a rash. The fact is that almost any figure one desires is available. The difference in them, if analyzed closely, lies in the specific interest of the experts and their companies or institutions at the particular time the forecasts are made. Of course, all such long-term forecasts are quite safe because, by the time the end of the period has been reached, people have either forgotten the figures, the forecaster has retired, died, gone broke, or become such a big man in the industry that no one dare recall the error he made 20 years earlier. There are too many hidden and unknown factors which control forecasts. Who knows what indicators are lurking in the darkness? What kind of government will we have in the future? To what extent will other energy sources move in on conventional energy sources? And about population, is it possible that the trend in population will change? War or disease, or even new pills could change the whole picture in population forecasts.