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World not running out of oil, say experts       Carl Mortished, World Business Editor   Doom-laden forecasts that world oil supplies are poised to fall off the edge of a cliff are wide of the mark, according to leading oil industry experts who gave warning that human factors, not geology, will drive the oil market. A landmark study of more than 800 oilfields by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (Cera) has concluded that rates of decline are only 4.5 per cent a year, almost half the rate previously believed, leading the consultancy to conclude that oil output will...

Panelists discuss climate changes, peak oil By Jake Palmateer Staff Writer http://www.thedailystar.com/local/local_story_340040035.html ONEONTA _ "Kill your lawn." That was one of the recommendations from a panel discussion based around peak oil and climate change held Wednesday night at the First United Methodist Church. Angelika St. Laurent of Cornell University promoted growing more vegetables and fruits locally _ including on lawns _ as a way to mitigate food-supply problems related to peak oil and climate change. ... ...Hubbert [in the 1950's] accurately predicted that American petroleum production would peak in less than two decades. ... a global peak, which Fleisher said...

It seems every day we find another entity that slams us for just living. One cannot smoke a good cigar, enjoy a glass of wine, drive a sport-utility vehicle, live in a decent home, turn on the lights or eat a steak without incurring the wrath of some do-gooder offended by behavior that supposedly is killing the planet or killing us. We need a new holiday: Freedom from Fear Day. Just before Thanksgiving, members of the Peak Oil Committee had a hearing in Hartford involving Connecticut's apparent lack of preparedness for the world running out of oil and natural gas....

"Water, water every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water every where, Nor a drop to drink." --Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ----------------------------------------------------- Iran isn’t an energy-independent country. I’m well aware that Iran produces more than 4 million barrels of oil per day, the fourth-highest production in the world. And with the near-constant reporting about Iranian crude reserves during the past six months, I find it difficult to believe that anyone could be unaware that Iran has 132 billion barrels in proven reserves--or, at least, they claim to. But what’s often ignored is that...

Energy Futures Fall After Energy Department Reports Unexpected Jump in Oil, Gasoline Supplies NEW YORK (AP) -- Energy futures fell sharply Thursday after the government reported unexpected increases in crude oil and gasoline inventories last week and OPEC forecast fourth-quarter demand for oil would be less than expected. ADVERTISEMENT At the pump, meanwhile, gas prices inched 0.1 cent higher overnight, pulling further above $3 to a national average price of $3.112 a gallon, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. Prices are likely to rise another 10 to 15 cents in coming weeks to catch up with oil...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Oil prices fell over $1 Thursday on signs of lower demand, a weakening economy and a surprise gain in U.S. supplies. U.S. light crude for January delivery fell $1.34 to $92.75 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Oil traded down 53 cents just prior to the report's release. In its weekly inventory report, the Energy Information Administration said crude stocks rose by 2.8 million barrels last week. Analysts were looking for a drop of 300,000 barrels, according to a Dow Jones poll.

After the CEO of Total (the French oil major) last week, two more CEOs of an oil major came out this Thursday to give stark warnings that mean that peak oil is happening right now. In addition, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (the IEA), one of the main cheerleaders of the "there's more than enough oil" camp until now, is giving an extraordinarily pessimistic interview in the Financial Times, following the recent publication of their latest World Energy Outlook. Let me take you through all their affirmations. Big Oil CEOs Point To Constraints On Supply Growth HOUSTON...

“Peak oil” is becoming the latest doomsday buzzword. What is it? It’s a well-thought-out theory that predicts that the rate at which we find and recover oil is soon going to fall behind the rate at which we consume it. The point at which that happens is the “peak.” Prior to this peak, prices will have been relatively stable and reasonable, and the economies of the world have grown because the supply of energy outpaced the demand. But there is coming a time, and some say it’s here now, when the world’s oil fields cannot produce as fast as we...

Global oil production will peak sometime between next year and 2018 and then decline, according to a controversial new model developed by a Swedish physicist. Since 1956, when American geophysicist M. King Hubbert correctly predicted that U.S. oil reserves would hit a peak within 20 years, experts have debated when the same might occur globally. Some oil companies and consultancy firms such as Cambridge Energy Research Associates speculate that oil will peak sometime after 2020, but a number of oil geologists and executives predict it will happen much sooner. And once production starts declining, there could be major supply problems,...

A rule of thumb for the price of oil in the past five years has been to take the last digit of the year and add a zero: 2002 saw prices in the $20s; 2003 in the $30s; now oil is hovering around $70 a barrel. These high prices are desirable for steering the economy away from oil, but in the meantime they could also spell trouble. Oil companies need to adjust to this new reality and rethink their business model. The latest report by the International Energy Agency warns of an oil supply crunch in five years. Demand is...

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OTTAWA — You will have noticed the marked decline these days in the number of "peak oil" people making cataclysmic pronouncements. Global oil production set records throughout 2006 -- for all-time highest production day, month, quarter and year. For the single-year record, production reached 31.3 Gb (billion barrels), an average of 85.2 million barrels a day. Affirming the trend, production set a new global single-day record before the end of January, 2007. Along with record-setting production came record-setting increases in reserves -- moving "peak oil" deeper into the century and ultimately beyond. The "peak oil" hypothesis, relentlessly propounded for decades,...

Oil supplies from non-Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries producers will increase by as much as 4 million barrels a day and peak in 2015 before dropping from then until 2030, OPEC said Tuesday. Conventional non-OPEC crude production is expected to rise to at 50.5 million barrels a day in 2015 and will fall by nearly 2 million barrels a day to 48.6 million barrels a day over the following 15 years, according to a presentation held by OPEC's research director, Hasan Qabazard, in Riyadh. Non-OPEC production stood at 46.8 million barrels a day in 2005, the presentation, entitled "Global Oil...

Petroleum geologists are pretty sure that there is more than enough oil in the world to meet projected demand for at least the next 25 years. In other words, as I reported in my article “Peak Oil Panic� last year, geologically speaking “peak oil� is at least a generation away. But the days when you could punch a hole in the ground and up would bubble some crude have now passed. It will take increasing technical savvy and a lot of money to keep oil production up with demand. Fortunately, the International Energy Agency believes that projected demand for oil...

People in the Peak Oil movement chafe at the label of doomer, but many of us do have an apocalyptic bent. Although plenty of Peak Oil commentary is sober analysis, a survey of the major websites and books quickly brings up apocalyptic titles like dieoff.org, oilcrash.com, The Death of the Oil Economy, The End of Suburbia, and The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. Peak Oil writings are sprinkled with predictions that billions will die, civil order will collapse, and even that civilization will end. Scientists, too, aren't immune. During geologist Ken Deffeyes's Peak Oil presentations, he displays the words "war,"...

"Peak Oil" the widely discussed theory that world oil production will soon reach a peak and go into sharp decline, is the subject of a new analysis by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA). CERA finds that the remaining global oil resource base is actually 3.74 trillion barrels -- three times as large as the 1.2 trillion barrels estimated by the theory's proponents. Cambridge, MA (PRWEB) December 7, 2006 -- Peak Oil, the widely discussed theory that world oil production will soon reach a peak and go into sharp decline, is the subject of a new analysis by Cambridge Energy Research...

Are hydrocarbons "renewable"- and if so- what does such a conclusion mean for the future of the world's oil and natural gas supplies? The question is critical due to the enormous amount of coverage the issue of "Peak Oil" is receiving from the mainstream press. If the supply of hydrocarbons is renewable- then the contrary to the conventional wisdom being touted throughout the mainstream press today- the world is NOT running out of oil. Unbeknownst to Westerners, there have actually been for quite some time now two competing theories concerning the origins of petroleum. One theory claims that oil is...

According to a report published by Stratfor, the Strategic Forecasting consultancy, in late 2002, "tankers bearing Russian crude from the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk would unload at Israel's Mediterranean port of Ashkelon. After that, the oil would traverse the Tipline to Israel's Red Sea port of Eilat, where it would be reloaded onto tankers for shipment to Asia. The Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Co. estimated the pipeline will be ready for Russian crude in mid-2003." Russia is emerging as a major oil supplier and a serious challenge to the hegemony of Saudi Arabia and OPEC... Russia also hopes to neuter the...

NEW YORK - According to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas, the end is near - when the earth's oil reserves start to run dry and scarce petroleum will go to the highest bidder. Seers have written books detailing that time, and websites such as EnergyShortage.com forecast a steady rise in prices - such as Tuesday's oil price of more than $59 a barrel. Not so fast, maintains a new report issued Tuesday by the widely respected group Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA). Instead of the wells running dry, CERA says petroleum supplies will be expanding...

RIMINI, Italy (AP) -- A top OPEC official said Sunday that oil companies with surging third-quarter profits should use the money to increase their refining capacity and help ease pressure on oil prices. "This is a chance for them to invest," said Adnan Shihab-Eldin, acting secretary-general of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. "We believe that they should definitely make an effort to invest in the downstream in trying to resolve the bottlenecks," caused by rapidly expanding demand, Shihab-Eldin said during a conference here on long-term issues of energy supply. Several major oil companies reported third-quarter profits this week. "We've...

It's A Bad Time To Be Exxon Mobil Have Oil Company Profits Peaked? Exxon Mobil (NYSE: XOM) reported revenues that were $12 billion below Wall Street estimates, citing lower than expected production numbers this week. Not only does this raise the possibility that the oil cycle might have peaked, but it also raises questions of whether the Peak Oil phenomenon is starting to unfold. Exxon Mobil is not so much a company but a money printing press, to paraphrase Jim Puplava. To be sure its 1Q revenue of $88 plus billion attests to the company's strong position in the market,...

Is the planet running out of gas? If it is, what should the Bush administration do about it?The Princeton geologist Ken Deffeyes warns that the imminent peak of global oil production will result in “war, famine, pestilence and death.” Deffeyes, author of 2001’s Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage and 2005’s Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak, predicted that the peak of global oil production would occur this past Thanksgiving.Deffeyes isn’t alone. The Houston investment banker Matthew Simmons claims in his 2005 book Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy that the...

DOHA, Qatar--Srhi Shankar Aiyar, minister of petroleum for India, knows the idea sounds outlandish, but he believes that India could become a petrodollar state in the 21st century. "If you don't get into the Bay of Bengal now, you will be left back as an Okie," he said during a presentation at the International Petroleum Technology Conference last week. "Unless you step into the breach, you may regret one day dismissing me as a raving lunatic." The optimism is grounded in massive oil deposits, close to 30 billion tons, in Central India. That's twice the size of the deposits in...

The discovery of reserves in the Gulf of Mexico means supply isn't topping out ... WORLDWIDE DEPOSITS. Other parts of the world that once appeared beyond the pale may also come into play. Areas believed to have oil deposits extremely deep beneath the ocean floor, which could now become commercially recoverable, include the North Sea off the coast of Britain, the Nile River Delta off the coast of Egypt, and possibly coastal Brazil, says Andrew Latham, a vice-president at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie in Edinburgh, Scotland. Other analysts say West Africa could harbor lots of ultra-deep deposits. The areas have...

Leading petroleum producers, including Saudi Arabia and Exxon Mobil Corp., are aggressively arguing that plenty of crude oil remains for world consumption, a move to counter critics who contend crude output is about to plateau, according to the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. The argument, known as the "peak-oil" theory, has provided intellectual backing for the boom in crude prices and sowed doubts among some policy makers about crude's long-term reliability as an energy source. Such doubts, coupled with concern over sky-high prices, have added impetus to the search for oil substitutes -- including in Washington, where President Bush declared...

Oil, at a recent $66.50 a barrel, will fall to $45 by mid-2007 and could dip briefly into the 20s in 2008. Sometime next year you are going to see a $1.95 price on a gas pump. So says Michael C. Lynch, 51, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research in Amherst, Mass. He swears he hasn't been inhaling fumes. His reasoning: New supply, coming online from all corners of the world, is more than ample to satisfy growth in demand and sufficient even to withstand an embargo against Iran, which produces 3.75 million barrels of oil a day. Lynch...

Rules, Small Returns Block New Refineries Wednesday June 9, 7:00 pm ET Mike Angell Sure, oil refiners are making a lot of money now. But there's no rush to build any more. Long term, oil refiners get a 5% return on investments, less than half that of a typical S&P 500 firm. Add to that changing government policy, myriad environmental laws and public opposition and you can see why no refineries have been built in the U.S. since 1976. Rising demand has sent gasoline prices soaring as crude prices hit new highs and refineries run all out to meet American...

Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko only has to look in the mirror and see his pockmarked, disfigured face – the result of chemical poisoning – to know that the KGB is still in charge in Moscow. Since the beginning of this year we all know it, too. Russia’s state-owned gas company Gazprom cut the supply of gas to Ukraine after the latter refused to pay the new price Russia is charging Kiev: a rise from 50$ to 230$ per 1,000 cubic metres of gas.

Kuwaiti oil production from the world's second-largest field is ``exhausted'' and falling after almost six decades of pumping, forcing the government to increase spending on new deposits, the chairman of the state oil company said. The plateau in output from the Burgan field will be about 1.7 million barrels a day, rather than as much as the 2 million a day that engineers had forecast could be maintained for the rest of the field's 30 to 40 years of life, said Farouk al-Zanki, the chairman of state-owned Kuwait Oil Co. Kuwait will spend about $3 billion a year for the...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. A notable feature of 2004 was its volatility in oil prices -- New York light sweet crude prices reached a peak of $55.67 on October 25 ending the year up 33.6 percent at $43.45 per barrel. While a number of supply-side and supply-chain factors have contributed to this situation, the most significant long-term factor contributing to rising oil prices is an increase in Asian demand, most notably from China. China's unprecedented growth not only makes it a driver of a long-term increase in energy prices, but also the most vulnerable to...

NEW YORK Hold on to your gas guzzlers: Cheap oil may once again be just around the corner. Even as consumers worry about high gasoline prices and rising heating bills, oil executives in London, Texas and Saudi Arabia seem to be concerned about a prospect of falling oil prices. In a recent speech in Singapore, John Browne, the chief executive of BP, spoke of a possible sharp drop in prices and called current levels "unsustainably high." John Hofmeister, head of Shell Oil in the United States, said during an interview, "This high price cycle is artificially inflated." The notion of...

A widely reported briefing by US investment house Goldman Sachs alerted markets to the possibility of an oil price superspike - a spike as high as $105 per barrel. Yet the full report, obtained by Aljazeera.net, paints a more complex and volatile picture. Notably it pits gas-guzzling American consumers against the geopolitical turmoil of oil-exporting nations.One the one hand it notes that "geopolitical turmoil in key oil exporting countries coupled with populist rhetoric ... keep foreign oil companies from developing host country resources in a timely manner ... that could otherwise meet oil demand growth at lower prices."These countries, notably Russia, the...

It all comes out of the ground, but it's not all the same. Roughly 85 million barrels of oil power the world's economies each day. Pumped from deserts, sea floors and backyards, much of it is free-flowing, low-sulfur oil that is easy and cheap to refine for use in cars, trucks and heating. It's the Good Stuff: light, sweet crude. Light because it is less viscous --- that is, less thick. Sweet because it has little of the sulfur that must be removed --- in a costly process --- to make gasoline, diesel and heating oil. Light, sweet crude. It...

Venezuela Buys Oil to Meet Contracts Dr. Joe Duarte Tuesday, May 02, 2006 A Sudden Plunge In Production? Is Venezuela's oil production rapidly waning? One source reports that the world's fifth largest oil producer is showing signs of a rapid decrease in production, one of the key tenets of the peak oil theory. Venezuela is buying oil from Russia in order to avoid defaulting on deliveries to clients. The situation raises serious questions about the country's oil production and the future of PDVSA as a major oil producer, and increases the risk to the U.S. oil supply should the country's...

The debate over "Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil" has begun to take familiar lines. "Peak oil" adherents continue to insist that oil resources worldwide are depleting. This mantra is repeated almost like an article of faith. Ever since M. King Hubbert drew his first "peak-production" curve, statements of this tenet are easy to find. Typically, the "Peak-Production" theory is articulated as so well established that further proof is not needed. "Peak production" statements abound in publication. Consider this example written by an energy consultant in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Petroleum reserves...

Short term, the kingdom fears economic disruption from price spikes. Long term, though, it seeks to manage the market with boosted capacity Unbelievable as it may sound, Saudi Arabia is practically applauding the 22% plunge in global oil prices since July. On Sept. 19, Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi called a price of about $60 per barrel "reasonable." Analysts think the Saudis could even live with a price in the mid-$50's per barrel. "The Saudi price target is probably lower than the rest of OPEC; they are still happy at $50 per barrel," says David Kirsch, an analyst at PFC...

I find myself in a very strange situation. Everywhere I look I see very smart people expressing confident opinions about some future developments of various large and small-scale financial and economic phenomena. One might assume that these opinions should somehow filter into various decision making processes for for various kinds of analytical, strategic and tactical thinking. Therefore, one might hope that the opinions expressed by the smartest people with the most confidence are the most informed, balanced and rational. However, often I observe the opposite trend: the smarter the people are, the less they are interested in the world around...

CBN.com – (CBN News) - Some believe that the world as we have known it is about to change. Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) is talking about what he thinks could be the biggest challenge in our nation's history. "The world has never faced a problem like this," Bartlett said. A huge and sustained increase in the price of oil that would devastate our economy and the world economy, and would force all of us to change the way we live. Why? It is a phenomenon known as "peak oil." The idea is that oil is a finite resource. There is...

Oil reserves, new finds, politics In May 2006 I wrote, "I know about the "Peak Oil" theory that says we either have or are about to reach the point of diminishing returns regarding the world's oil supply, but these recent discoveries suggest there is still plenty of oil to be found." In that commentary I documented nearly a dozen new fields of oil and natural gas discovered since 1995. So I wasn't surprised when, on September 5, Chevron Corporation announced it had discovered new, huge reserves of oil some five miles below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. The...

Leading players in the petroleum industry, including Saudi Arabia and Exxon Mobil Corp., are aggressively arguing that plenty of crude oil remains for world consumption, in an effort to counter critics who contend crude output is about to plateau. That argument, known as peak-oil theory, has provided intellectual backing for the boom in crude prices and sowed doubts among some policy makers about crude's long-term reliability as an energy source. Such doubts, coupled with concern over sky-high prices, have added impetus to the search for oil substitutes -- including in Washington, where President Bush this year declared the U.S. "addicted...

WASHINGTON - The recent sharp drop in the global price of crude oil could mark the start of a massive sell-off that returns gasoline prices to lows not seen since the late 1990s - perhaps as low as $1.15 a gallon. "All the hurricane flags are flying" in oil markets, said Philip K. Verleger, a noted energy consultant who was a lone voice several years ago in warning that oil prices would soar. Now, he tells McClatchy Newspapers, they appear to be poised for a dramatic plunge. Crude oil prices have fallen about $14, or roughly 17 percent, from their...

The elephants aren't extinct yet. Chevron Corp. and its partners say they have tapped into an area that may contain as much as 15 billion barrels of oil in the ultradeep waters of the Gulf of Mexico — the kind of massive reservoir of crude that the industry dubs an elephant discovery. The days of such discoveries were supposedly gone, with oil supplies peaking as the world simply ran out of big oil-producing fields, according to pessimistic forecasters. Instead, high technology and sky-high oil prices have combined to transform dud prospects into billions of barrels of crude. “The industry is...

As the Auto Age Dawned, Gasoline Wasn't King By Steven Levingston Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, August 13, 2006; F01 D.H. Killeffer had a dire warning for gasoline-greedy Americans. The chemical engineer had crunched the numbers -- he compared the country's production of crude oil with its thirst for gasoline. "Estimates based on the most complete data now available place the end of our gasoline supply between ten and twenty years, with the odds in favor of ten rather than twenty," Killeffer, secretary of the New York division of the American Chemical Society, wrote in the New York Times. The...

# Oil and natural gas production capacity should surge by 25% to 110 million barrels per day by the year 2015 - the result of investments in new and unconventional petroleum sources like oil-sand deposits and oil shale, according to a study conducted by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA). # The research firm's forecast, if accurate, "would ease the current perception of taut supplies that have driven oil prices up 25% so far this year and 285% since the end of 2001," according to Investor's Business Daily. # While presently, there are only approximately 2 million barrels worth of spare...

Global oil capacity can rise faster than demand for the next decade and beyond according to a fresh study of world oil fields that works to puncture views that higher prices are imminent as supplies near a peak. The call from a well-respected international energy consultancy comes as oil prices trade near a record, pushed this week by problems that are forcing Alaskan producers to shutter 400,000 barrels a day. Immediate disruptions aside, worldwide production capacity could increase nearly 25 per cent by 2015, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "In the short term, as we all know, this is...

Fears of the world reaching "peak oil" supply and facing a crisis that results as demand continues to grow in the developing world are overblown, and the supply of oil may increase 25 percent by 2015, a worldwide energy consulting firm said Tuesday. Cambridge Energy Research Associates of Cambridge, Mass., concluded that world crude-oil production could rise from the current 88 million barrels per day to 110 million barrels in nine years. The new oil capacity will come mostly from so-called unconventional sources such as ultradeep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and offshore Africa and South America, as well...

Output at Mexico's most important oil field has fallen steeply this year, raising fears that wells that generate 60 percent of the country's petroleum are in the throes of a major decline. Production at Cantarell, the world's second-largest oil complex, in the shallow Gulf of Mexico waters off the shore of Mexico's southern Campeche state, averaged just over 1.8 million barrels a day in May, according to recent government figures. That's a 7 percent drop from the first of the year and the lowest monthly output since July 2005, when Hurricane Emily forced the evacuation of thousands of oil workers...

Gasoline demand falls in first half of 2006 API: lofty crude prices hurt demand, gasoline imports at a record By Myra P. Saefong, MarketWatch Last Update: 10:00 AM ET Jul 19, 2006 SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Record prices for crude oil contributed to lower U.S. gasoline demand in the first half of this year, but the nation imported the fuel at a record pace, according to the American Petroleum Institute Wednesday. U.S. gasoline demand fell by 0.4% in the second quarter of 2006, compared with an increase of 0.5% in the first quarter, the API said in its June statistical...

The Texas oil industry knows all about peak oil, because we've already gone through it. In 1972, Texas was king of the oil world. We had increased our oil production by 40 percent during the previous 10 years at relatively low prices. Texas producers were poised for surging production as oil prices exploded and rose tenfold by 1980. The state underwent its biggest drilling boom in history. The number of producing wells jumped 14 percent by 1982. The industry consensus was that oil production would increase dramatically. To general astonishment, it fell instead, despite dramatically higher prices, frantic drilling and...

A Canadian company has developed a new, more efficient process to make the alternative fuel ethanol from farm waste. With today's high oil prices, experts hope the new technology could reduce demand on fossil fuels and increase energy security. "In the past, ethanol fuel use has been limited, because the cost of production was too high," said Jim Easterly, a Washington, D.C.-based bioenergy consultant. "Ethanol produced from corn kernels and wheat grain has historically been more expensive than gasoline produced from oil." Producing corn-based ethanol, for example, uses energy from oil and electricity for everything from growing the corn to...