Dave Waters, Director & Geoscience Consultant, Paetoro Consulting UK Ltd

I'm becoming, with time, increasingly interested in the science of expectation management. It might sound daft to call this a science, but I think it is a fascinating aspect of the world in 2022.

The last century and a half has fuelled a hydrocarbon fed boom of many things, and without acclaiming or criticising that, it is what it is.

The simplicity of the matter though is that it won't be repeated over the next century. A variety of other things that people may claim will come to the rescue, will almost certainly help, but they are not sufficient to maintain what is often phrased "business as usual".

While in many ways this is an inherently technical, scientific and engineering issue, I suspect we sometimes also underestimate how hugely it is also a psychological issue, for want of a better term.

Conditioning both ourselves and future generations to the fact that replication of past levels of certain things just won't be possible. That's not to suggest life will be poverty or miserable, just that the 20th century will not even remotely be a template for the 21st or 22nd.

Before any of the technical changes can be accepted, there is probably a vast global exercise in expectation management that has to take place. In many ways that will be hardest for the richest countries who for many decades haven't had to contemplate anything other than continuation of past modes.

It is then, I suspect, a fascinating and tremendously important science. How to introduce at scale reduced expectations of what can be delivered. For now the need for that is not universally perceived, so that is another challenge - but this will likely become more obvious with time.

To be clear, this is not to suggest that human thriving and quality of life will disappear. It's just to suggest that the means of obtaining those things looks set to change significantly, with many 20th century habits already unsustainable and more becoming so.

The science of how to manage these expectations then, at national and global scales, looks set to be a growth area.

KeyFacts Energy Industry Directory: Paetoro Consulting