Richard Lyon speaks to conferences, newsrooms, lecture halls, boardrooms — and the back rooms of pubs — about the physical limits the energy debate keeps ignoring, and what an honest energy realism actually requires. Thirty years in the industry have left him as comfortable taking questions over a pint as briefing ministers and boards: the level of the room changes; the physics doesn’t.
Energy gradient, energy density and areal power density — the rules no subsidy or press release can repeal. An audience leaves able to check the headlines for themselves.
Hydrocarbons aren’t just fuel — they’re the feedstock for the fertiliser, steel, cement and plastics that keep eight billion people fed and housed. Why ‘electrify everything’ can’t replace the menu.
Why the oil industry always seems to have fourteen years left, what reserve figures actually count (accounting, not geology), and how to read what really remains.
Does a renewables-powered system return more energy than it consumes? Nobody has measured it — and the energy cliff leaves almost no margin for error.
Money is a claim on future energy. Why printing more can’t conjure less, and what an energy-constrained economy means for everything you own.
This is not a counsel of despair. Where the remaining inheritance should go, what a managed descent asks of us, and how an informed public forces better choices than the ones made in its name.
Formats: keynotes · conference panels · university & school lectures · podcasts · radio & broadcast · pub talks & informal evenings
Thirty years in oil & gas across five countries · BEng Electrical · MEng Petroleum · MSc Energy Economics
Tell Richard a little about the event or request and he’ll come back to you personally. Speaking invitations, media and interview requests, and general enquiries all reach the same inbox.