Looking down from the peak

With gasoline prices just below the all-time national high of May 18, did some families have smaller reunions this Thanksgiving? Texas AAA said no but added, “Thanksgiving travelers are paying the highest prices ever for gasoline in … November.”

And Trilby Lundberg of the Lundberg Survey remarked, “We can easily exceed that all-time high price this year even if crude prices fall.”


Gas prices will keep rising even if crude drops because it takes time for price changes at the wellhead to reach the gas pump. And while the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries does limit production, it isn’t helping that turmoil is limiting Iraq’s production.

A weak dollar also means it takes more bucks to import crude, which the Government Accountability Office says was two-thirds of what we burned in 2005, most for transportation.

Yet another factor is the growing acceptance of theories that, globally, we are approaching the peak of oil production, after which it will decline and become pricier, theories that, until recently, were dismissed as alarmist bunk.

And it all began when Shell geophysicist M. King Hubbert predicted, to the American Petroleum Institute’s 1956 meeting in San Antonio, that oil production tracks out as a bell curve.

Austin American-Statesman