The future price of oil? Pick a number

[robertpaulsen]

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

The invasion of Iraq cost the world $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone. Geoffrey Lean reports.

Mamdouh Salameh believes the oil price would now be no more than $US40 a barrel, less than a third of the current price, if not for the Iraq war.

An oil economist adviser to the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation, Dr Salameh says that among the world's biggest oil producers, Iraq alone has enough reserves to increase flow substantially. Production in eight others - the United States, Canada, Iran, Indonesia, Russia, Britain, Norway and Mexico - has peaked, he says, while China and Saudia Arabia, the remaining two, are nearing the point of decline. Before the war, Saddam Hussein's regime pumped 3.5 million barrels of oil a day, but this has fallen to just 2 million barrels.

Salameh told a British parliamentary committee last month that Iraq had offered the US a deal, three years before the war, that would have opened 10 new giant oil fields on "generous" terms, in return for lifting sanctions. "This would certainly have prevented the steep rise of the oil price," he said. "But the US had a different idea. It planned to occupy Iraq and annex its oil."






Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/the-future-price-of-oil-pick-a-number/2008/06/20/1213770924692.html

[emad]

1. Russia peaked? Recent UK TV Newsnight program said Russia

still the biggest world produced of crude and gas with more confirmed but untapped wells than any other country except fopr Kazakhstan.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

2. I am really starting to be really over...

This "Peak Oil" meme. More and more it looks like Peak Oil is just FUD that has been thrown out there by the players to give them some cover. They knew it would play to the left and environmentalists. Easy peasy.

Not that it isn't coming up down the road and not that alternatives should not be developed NOW. It is simply that this is another manipulation on the part of The Oil Field Trash.

[robertpaulsen]

3. This was reported in April of this year. Looks like Russia peaked in 2007.

Russia Hits Peak Oil
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3170539

[emad]

5. Russia Proves 'Peak Oil' is a Misleading Zionist Scam !!!!

Posted purely on amusement grounds...


While Moscow invests heavily in unlimited oil production for the future, New
York squanders America's dwindling oil profits on fast cars and fast women
Copyright Joe Vialls, 25 August 2004
http://www.vialls.com/wecontrolamerica/peakoil.html

[robertpaulsen]

7. What Kunstler calls the Chewy Nougat Center Earth theory.

Thanks for that emad! Almost looks like an Onion article.

[emad]

8. Looked real hard but still can't see any of them 'fast women'....

[happyslug]

12. The US peaked in 1970, and the US is still #3 oil producer

#2 is Saudi Arabia. My point is just because a country has peaked does NOT mean it can NOT be #1. The US was still the #1 producer while into the 1980s, even as the US was IMPORTING oil and oil production was in decline (Give you an idea on how big was the US oil fields).

In fact Russia peaked in 1987 and went into terminal decline. The Fall of the Soviet Union was caused by the cash flow problem of the drop in oil sales. The Soviet Union had a choice cut its military spending or domestic spending. The old Soviet Union could do neither, so it collapsed. No money for the troops, no money to pay foreign debts, no money for domestic issues. Something had to give and it ended up the Government. Oil production fell all through the 1990s but then then went up after 2000 do to the fact Putin was able to get money into the oil fields to bring oil production back up to about 2/3 of the level of the early 1980s. Russian oil production is now in decline and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Energy Information Agency (EIA) report on Russian oil production:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/Russia/Oil.html

[emad]

4. Do High Petroleum Prices Mean We've Reached 'Peak Oil'?

SNIP:

Peak oil, followed by a permanent decline in global oil production, is a "reasonable hypothesis," according to David Goodstein, a physics professor at Caltech and author of "Out of Gas"(W.W. Norton, 2004).

"If we've reached the peak, then that's it," Goodstein said this week, echoing a March 2007 report by the U.S. General Accountability Office speculating that oil resources would begin to dwindle sometime between now and 2040. "I think you can invest as much as you want in new exploration and it won't improve matters."

A study last year by a Swedish researcher predicted oil production will peak sometime between this year and 2018.

Other analysts, however, say that we've barely explored our energy potential, much less run the risk of being tapped out completely.

"New field discoveries are only about 25 percent of the source of most of the reserve additions of oil," said William Fisher, a geologist at the University of Texas at Austin. "About 70 percent of it comes from oil through increased recovery out of existing fields. Around the world, up to this existing point, we have already discovered about 7 trillion barrels of oil in the ground."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,369553,00.html

[L0oniX]

6. How much more of a demand for oil has the Iraq war cost?

Blame Bush ...again. When in doubt, blame Bush. Blame Bush first, ask questions later.

[crimsonblue]

9. The single largest consumer of petrol is the US Military...

Combine the Iraq War with Rampant Speculation, decreased domestic production due to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (and voluntary cutbacks by the Big 5), and artificial demand spikes created by Saudi Arabia reducing their output by 500 Million barrels last year, and it's kind of hard to imagine how oil wouldn't go up.

[cachukis]

10. peak oil

you need to read

www.theoildrum.com

read read read

[L0oniX]

11. Good link. ...bookmarked n/t