Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
IN TWO years’ time the price of oil could reach $200 a barrel. Farfetched? Maybe. Although estimates of oil and gas reserves vary widely, geologists Anders Sivertsson, Kjell Aleklett and Colin Campbell, of Uppsala University in Sweden, are the latest in a growing group of experts who believe that oil supplies will peak by 2010, if not before, and gas soon after.
There are good reasons to assume that a US campaign against Iran will commence within months and that this will serve to open the next and much expanded phase of what is actually the Global Oil War of the 21st century.
“Waiting until world conventional oil production peaks before implementing crash program mitigation leaves the world with a significant liquid fuel deficit for two decades or longer,” according to a report prepared for the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) by Science Applications International Coporation (SAIC). [Link to the full report mentioned in ASPO Bulletin #51]
INDONESIA’S President plans to visit an island near the Malaysian border after he sent warships there, following Malaysia’s move to award oil exploration rights there, a government official said yesterday.
Citing disappointing drilling results in two locales, ChevronTexaco Corp. slashed its U.S. natural gas reserves by 13 percent in 2004, the third year in a row in which it suffered a substantial reserves hit in the region.
The Venezuelan president said OPEC could set prices between US$40 and US$50, while the US said its oil imports from the country were replaceable
OIL-rich Iran has raised the stakes in the standoff over its nuclear program, warning that any attempt to impose sanctions on its activities would lead to an energy crisis in the US and Europe.
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern revives the neocon’s old nickname, the ‘crazies,’ to describe their approach to oil depletion, the possibility of an overt war with Iran and the problems of the Israeli-US military nexus for peace in the Middle East.
The crucial needs that must be met in an age of decline are damage control, cultural survival, and the building of a new society amid the ruins of the old. Political and business interests aren’t going to meet these needs, or do anything else helpful; oil is to the modern industrial nations what corn was to the ancient Maya, and the ahauob of Washington and Wall Street have turned to war just as their Maya equivalents did.
Another wave of mergers may be building in the energy industry as persistent high oil prices, stockpiles of cash and a shortage of inexpensive places to drill are driving companies to eye their competitors.
This month’s ASPO Newsletter includes a depletion profile of Malaysia, and collates some of the most important energy news from the last month.
Any production numbers for OPEC are subject to the key question: net or gross? This pattern, of domestic oil demand increasing much faster than production, is common to far more than 9 out of 10 oil producers, both OPEC and nonOPEC. Net exports, therefore, will always tend to grow slower than national production.
