Oil exec says energy use by 2020 will equal 2,000 daily trips to sun

Alumnus Chris Xu, assistant professor of applied and engineeering physics at Cornell, looks, with his wife, Alice Li, at the Tau Beta Pi teaching award he was given at the Dean's Award Banquet in the Statler Ballroom, April 16. The banquet was part of the day's Cornell Society of Engineers conference. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

By David Brand

By the year 2020 the world will be consuming about 40 percent more energy than it does today, so that daily energy consumption will equal 2,000 round trips to the sun, or a mid-size car traveling roughly 378 billion miles a day, an analyst for Exxon Mobil Corp. said at a Cornell engineering conference April 16.

The graphic estimate was made by Elissa P. Sterry, a 1979 Cornell graduate in operations research and industrial engineering, speaking at the Cornell Society of Engineers (CSE) conference at Barnes Hall. Sterry is manager for economics and energy in Exxon Mobil's Corporate Planning Department, the fact-finding unit for senior management and directors on energy issues.

This year's conference, sponsored both by the CSE and the College of Engineering, featured talks on the applications and business potential of new technologies in energy, as well as sustainable development in industry, presented by Cornell alumni who are leading energy industry figures and faculty members who are leading the research at Cornell. The talks ranged from topics such as bringing an environmental approach to mining and manufacturing to the development of wind power and fuel cells.

Sterry, who was looking at energy trends through 2020, noted that energy demand will continue to be driven by economic growth, estimated at 3 percent annually, and by the expected rise in the world's population over the next two decades. She estimated that 80 percent of this growth in energy demand will come from the developing world, with China and India together accounting for 30 percent. ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, will continue to focus on oil and gas development because, she said, these two fossil fuels will continue to meet 60 percent of the world's energy needs in 2020.

Of these fuels, Sterry said, the greatest production growth will come in natural gas, which is environmentally compatible because natural gas is the lowest emitter of carbon of the fossil fuels. Indeed, 80 percent of new electricity generating capacity in the United States through 2020 will use natural gas as a fuel.

But she noted a "profound" change that will occur in natural gas production during the period as it moves from a regional to a global market. Thus North America will move from self-sufficiency in natural gas to a possible 12 percent in imports, in the form of liquefied natural gas, from West Africa and the Middle East, particularly Qatar.

As for oil, she said, the question most often asked these days is "how much oil is there and when will it run out?" While admitting that the question is difficult to answer, she illustrated her answer by putting world oil supplies in three "buckets." The first -- conventional resources that can be exploited using available technology -- contains 3 trillion barrels (compared with the 1 trillion barrels of petroleum that have been pumped since production began in the 1800s).

The second bucket contains oil sources that can't be recovered using conventional technology, such as oil sands and extra-heavy oil. These amount to an estimated 4.3 trillion barrels. And in the third bucket are unrecoverable resources that "we are pretty sure are there, but we are not sure how to get them economically," she said. These amount to an estimated 4 trillion barrels.

"There are a lot of resources here," Sterry said, "and will allow for oil and gas to be the primary sources of energy through at least the middle of the century." She noted that new technologies likely will continue to extend the recoverable resource base, making additional, but currently uneconomical, resources commercially attractive. In fact, she said, recoverable oil resources are today more than 70 percent higher than they were in 1980 thanks to such improvements as three-dimensional seismic imaging, drilling in deep water and horizontal drilling.