as above. russia is the new largest producer, and china has shown it is willing to break futures contracts.
Peak oil is assured (unless you believe 86 million barrels of oil a day can be produced ad infinitum). The only real question is "How soon, how bad?" btw: its forwards not futures
Figures 2 and 3 in this link: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5678 suggest that July 2008 could have been the peak. However this will only be known for sure in the years to come.
I've been thinking about this for a while... The answer isn't straighforward Looking back in the past few years, I do realize how precisely in time somebody envisaged, introduced and escalated this concept It might be a problems with demand/supply balance in the near future. However there is still a lots of oil sitting in the ground. Raising daily capacity in order to fullfil growing demand would be tricky but that would depend on the new hi-tech and the ability to attract massive CAPEX investment. US for example could easily get on stream approx 3-4 mln barrels per day investing in offshore fileds or in tar sands development. Here in Russia government hit export volumes of former USSR, pumping crude oil as a frenzy.But consider that our E&P sector was heavily underinvested for decades. Many of the authors warning about peak oil have no background in either the oil or mineral industries. The bulk of what is written consist of nothing more that a load of clueless nonsence.
does anyone expect a high oil price in the long term not from peak oil but from underinvestment of exploration and high demand? china's has record car sales this year from the stimulus, they definitely need oil, there are people calling for $200+ oil calls for oil to be dominated in something other than US dollars,others say that oil is a better hedge for inflation than gold, oh my, the times we live in. just my concern from my off shore and expolration stocks im eyeing
yes, when you prohibit drilling and borrow trillions to pass out to people to buy things, like gas for their cars, there would seem to be only one direction price can go.
Those 2 sentences contradict each other. You don't need to be in the oil industry (actually, that would give you an immediate bias) to see that when you keep using an not replenishable resource, sooner or later you run out of it. What's more, you can even run out of a replenishable resource, if the usage is faster than the rate of replenishment. Look at what happened to the American Buffalo, whale oil or the dodo bird. So as it was mentioned, it is the when and with what effects what the questions are not that we believe in peak oil.
Check out the latest issue of Scientific American. There's an article pertinent to this topic. A synopsis is here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=squeezing-more-oil