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Don’t get too used to the low oil prices
The Financial Times has leaked the results of the International Energy Agency’s long-awaited study of the depletion profiles of the world’s 400 largest oilfields, indicating that, “Without extra investment to raise production, the natural annual rate of output decline is 9.1 per cent.”
This is a stunning figure.
Considering regular crude oil only, this means that 6.825 million barrels a day of new production capacity must come on line each year just to keep up with the aggregate natural decline rate in existing oilfields. That’s a new Saudi Arabia every 18 months.
Full article here: http://postcarbon.org/nine_percent
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I’ll make the (completely amateur) prediction that oil will hit $200/barrel within 1-3 years. The gloabl economic crisis may have pushed things toward the longer guestimate but I don’t think we are going to see any significant (i.e. %5+) decline in global demand for oil within that time frame.
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Jermyn’s thoughts: hmmm … time to get a hybrid car
with opec controlling supply i doubt it will fall much and can only go up over time.
(i remember reading read a few weeks ago that they reduced supply to stop the prices from falling)
while i do not know if there’s an cheem economic justification for preventing the decline of oil prices, it leads me to believe that we are at the mercy of the oil cartel.