OPEC exploration declining despite rising prices

Some of the world’s biggest oil-producing countries have reduced their investment in new capacity despite record oil prices. The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries this week revealed its members drilled 6.5 per cent fewer wells in 2003, suggesting the global supply crunch and high oil prices could last longer than expected, analysts said. The numbers appear to contradict statements by Opec members that they are actively building extra capacity.

Motley crude

Oil prices are at record highs, production may well have peaked, yet demand continues to soar. So why aren`t the oil companies panicking?

The San Francisco Chronicle, in 1971, carried a small item: “The Texas Railroad Commission announced a 100% allowable for next month.” It was a very cryptic report and, knowing newspapers, it was probably simply used as a filler.

An answer in Somerset: The Age of Entropy is here. We should all now be learning how to live without oil

‘Never again,” the Texas oil baron and corporate raider T Boone Pickens announced this month, “will we pump more than 82m barrels.” As we are pumping 82m barrels of oil a day at the moment, what Pickens is saying is that global production has peaked. If he is right, then the oil geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, who announced to general ridicule last year that he was “99% confident” it would happen in 2004, has been vindicated. Rather more importantly, industrial civilisation is over.