Peter McKenzie-Brown's  Instablog

“This is a way of getting inside the energy system, getting a sense of its possibilities. I’ve been around for a while, and I’ve never seen anything like it.” The speaker is Bob Taylor. After a long corporate career with a pair of big oil companies, he joined Alberta’s Department of Energy’s as assistant deputy minister for oil development. Now retired, in that job he had responsibility for conventional oil, oil sands, land access, and energy and Aboriginal relationships. Today he is excited about something he believes is much bigger than all of these combined.

An engineer by training, Taylor is part of an informal group of senior patch people who have formed a not-for-profit organization they call the Energy Futures Network. They argue that Canadian policy-makers – whether they work in government, industry or the world of NGOs – should be able to take the longest possible view of resources to make sensible decisions.

"The exact analogy [to the modelling system] is the flight simulator. You can get into the simulator and use the controls to see how the plane will respond. The nice thing is that if you crash the plane, you can learn from your mistakes. You don’t want to crash the plane in real life.”

Balance of article here: http://languageinstinct.blogspot.com/2009/07/exploration-fuel.html