Peak Oil Trends Paint “A Very Alarming Picture”

While energy demand may be tempered by a slowdown in global economic growth, longer term growing energy demands and supply constraints will continue to present incredible challenges. Much more capital will need to be allocated to the sector to address supply issues, which should create opportunities for investors. We noted the following developments in the energy sector last month:

The concept of ‘peak oil’ has been derided by the big oil companies for years, but last week the chief executive of the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, Jeroen van der Veer, released a study forecasting the end of easy oil. Dr. Jim Buckee, retired president and chief executive of major independent Talisman Energy, claims he was not surprised that Royal Dutch Shell admitted oil supplies were getting tighter. Dr. Buckee says ‘peak oil’ is either here, or very close. “It is the underlying decline of the world’s major fields that is the dominant driving factor here,” he said.
“If you think that at the moment the world is consuming 30-plus billion barrels a year of oil and is finding seven or eight billion barrels a year, and this state of affairs has been going on now for 20 or more years. . . It’s obviously unsustainable and the world is increasingly drawing on the bigger, older fields. You couple that notion with the irreversibility of decline and you’ve got a very alarming picture.”

Dr. Buckee says the cost of a barrel of oil could reach as high as $200 by the third or fourth quarters of this year, and that prices would have to get that high before it would have any particular impact on demand. “I don’t think that really we’ve seen any rationing of consumption by price,” he said. Source: (ABC Premium News ( Australia ))

Oil at $100 a barrel gives exporters an incentive to pump more, but their difficulty in doing so indicates the world is struggling to sustain production. A growing number of leading industry figures, including the CEO’s of Total and ConocoPhillips, now question mainstream forecasts for supply. They suggest the era of “plateau oil” is nearer than many in the business have admitted.

Some argue it may not be possible to boost flows beyond the current rate of 86 million barrels per day (bpd). Conventional supply from non-OPEC producers have missed forecasts in recent years and appear for now to have hit an “effective plateau”, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), adviser to industrialized countries. (Reuters)

Global demand for oil is likely to grow by about 1.4 million barrels a day in 2008 according to forecasts by Lehman Brothers. Current global demand is roughly 86 million barrels per day. Some experts predict lower economic growth will reduce demand. Lawrence J. Goldstein, an economist at the Energy Policy Research Foundation, expects global demand to grow by less than a million barrels a day in 2008 due to slowing economic growth. (New York Times)

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