WATCHING THE WORLD WEC'S ENERGY FORECAST

In the days of soaring crude oil prices and the belief that supplies would remain tight into the foreseeable future, one of the popular ways of spending those hot petrodollars was to finance an expensive forecast of the state of world energy supplies toward the end of the century.

Sponsors were comforted to learn--incorrectly, as it turned out--that reserves would become more valuable year after year and crude prices would take off into the stratosphere.

Another of the failures of that generation of forecasts was the tendency to report on world oil supplies and world energy and make only a passing reference to the many regional variations.

ANSWERING QUESTIONS

As prices have fallen, reports into the medium and long term future have become much rarer. However, during the next 2 years the World Energy Council (WEC) will attempt to answer questions that were rarely posed in other reports, let alone answered.

Under the routine title, Energy for Tomorrow's World, a specially established commission will try to identify strategies and recommend ways for adequate energy to be supplied worldwide while achieving a balance between the needs for environmental protection and economic development.

WEC has been producing long range studies since 1975 and claims it is unique as the only international multienergy organization in a position to inform and marshal world opinion to solve major energy problems.

For the purposes of the study, the world will be divided into nine regions. Each will have a coordinator drawn from WEC member committees and able to draw on the resources of many international agencies.

Balancing social, economic, and energy supply needs will lead to different solutions for different regions. And, says the council, not all the solutions will be environmentally benign.

WEC makes the point that the most important input must come from expertise that is closest to regional problems. Having said that, it concedes that an external view is important to introduce new ideas and act as a catalyst to stimulate local action to find solutions.

In addition, it will be essential to introduce a global view not only of energy related problems, but also to consider regional supply proposals in terms of their net effect on world perceptions.

WHO'S WHO

Chairman of the project is Statoil Executive Vice-Chairman Henrik Ager-Hanssen. The commission has recruited an executive director, Derek Davis, currently an executive board member of the U.K.'s Central Electricity Generating Board, which will disappear once the state owned industry is sold to the private sector.

Davis will head an executive unit based in London with analytical and computer support. In addition to handling day to day work of the commission, the unit will manage the corporate study and collate and coordinate the generation of conclusions and recommendations.

Target date for the final draft is the end of June 1992. The full report will be presented to the next World Energy Congress in Madrid later that year.