Robert Rapier of R2 and the Oil Drum, Alan Drake of the Oil Drum and I participated in a conference call on the "gasoline situation" - Blogger Conference Call with API's Rayola Dougher - offered by the American Petroleum Institute this past Thursday.

On the call was the the CEO of the API [for a while], their statistician, an economist and a mix of production and press people as well has half a dozen other bloggers with energy beats. It was wonderful the API put in so much effort.

[See transcript or listen to podcast.]

I'm no petroleum expert; my interest was systems resiliency - what was the API thinking about upcoming shortages? The gasoline system is critical - running straight out - what was API thinking about demand and elasticity? What happens when a branch in Ohio falls on a pipeline? What sort of policies would they like to see adopted generally and in times of shortage?

I emailed Robert after the call that I felt disappointed by the answers. Surely an economist and a statistician should be able to take some sort of SWAG at elasticity for gasoline. Surely the CEO would be concerned about the impact of shortages on legislative policy. API would have a concise position on increasing gasoline taxes, wouldn't they?

Now that I've slept on it, my initial observation stands, that my questions about shortages - and what thought API has given to dealing with shortages - simply "did not compute". Nor did my questions about elasticity of gasoline demand or broader concepts of systems resilience compute. I don't think I was on their planet. I didn't even get a good answer on taxes. Sure, they might not be able to take a position and sure, this might have been a much more industrially inclined group, but hey, I'd have thought statisticians and economists would have been able to come up with at least a statement of what they had been thinking.

I've not had time to listen to podcast or read the transcript yet myself. [There will be an update.] I stated my questions pretty broadly at first and got increasingly specific but maybe I wasn't clear.

Then again, it might be that my questions were so far out of context that they were unintelligible. Sort of like talking to an economist about Peak Oil. Which is, after all, exactly what I was doing.

I don't think the API is paying attention to the things to which I'm paying attention - and it is, after all, their business. But to me, it seems unlikely they have not given any thought to the recommendations and policies they will want to see when shortages happen. They should. Just yesterday, two barges of gasoline had to be diverted [the reference on Oil Drum has no link].

That, we will hear, is a special case. Happens all the time. No problem; shortages will be short-lived We'll catch up next month. Industry is running at highest capacity ever. Adding the equivalent of a new refinery every year by expansion. Record production. Record demand. Record prices.

That's not resilient. How did Bakhtiari put it? The End of the Modelling Period; this is for real.

I hope I'm wrong; I hope we have plenty of energy forever. But then again, even that good outcome would be a disaster: how many cars can we fit on this planet? We're so far down the exponential growth curve than any outcome short of enumerating the 10 zillion names of God and our being immediately beamed up to nirvana is a disaster for the species and Gaia.