The world is now losing more than a million barrels of oil a day to depletion – twice the rate of two years ago – according to a new analysis published this month in Petroleum Review.

Estimating how much oil a company owns thousands of feet underground is, at best, a slippery business.

Oil prices fell nearly a dollar to end just above $45 on Tuesday, in a third day of losses as a more optimistic Iraq export picture helped unwind some of the supply worries.

Global stock markets may have something far more ominous to worry about than the recent spike in oil prices, with one economist seeing a ‘Black Monday’ scenario in the making.

s the neo-conservative dream of a “liberated” Iraq came true in April 2003, who would have predicted that 16 months later oil would become the ultimate time bomb for the Bush administration?

Oil is no longer a free good made available to the aging consumer heartlands, but a vital and hard-to-substitute commodity that is entirely nonrenewable at human timescales, and whose ultimate peak of production is looming ever closer.

The Association for the Study of Peak Oil feels that the current increase in crude oil prices is only a foretaste of worse to come.

To some geologists, the world is heading toward an oil crisis of historic proportions. The crisis will come, they say, not when the wells go dry, but when world oil production reaches a peak and begins to decline.