October 24, 2007
Every day the world consumes some 85 million barrels of oil. Every twelve days - 1 billion barrels!!! The amount is staggering. A large field when you listen to the talking heads is 100 million barrels of recoverable oil. Whoopee!!! A little over one day's worth. A monster field is 1 billion barrels. Like what Chevron found in the Gulf of Mexico. Everyone gets excited. I keep thinking, so what? When I was in China, the information I heard was that China alone adds over 6,000 cars every day to its roads! That's going to require a lot of extra oil - just for cars! There are only four giant oil fields in the world that pump out more than 1 million barrels of oil a day and they are in Saudi Arabia, Venezula, Mexico and Iraq. The rest comes from thousands of wells all over the world. I see this ocean being depleted day after day. The hope now is that the Arctic will be a boom in the future. But that will take many years. The Canadian Oil Sands are pumping out 1 million barrels a day, increasing to 3 million barrels a day in the next ten years or so. I think we'll be paying more and more over time.
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Asia's fast-growing economies have made some progress in addressing their seemingly insatiable demand for oil, but they continue to fall far short of the cuts needed to significantly reduce pressure on global supplies.
Galloping growth in Asia, led by China, was one of the key reasons global oil prices started shooting up in 2004. China's economy was racing ahead after years of relative global insignificance, ignited by a spurt in new industrial output and a wave of domestic consumption of items, from cars to air conditioners, that pushed energy demand dramatically higher.
Asian demand for oil is on track to hit 25 million barrels a day this year, an increase of 2.5% from last year, according to the International Energy Agency in Paris. World demand is set to rise a more modest 1.5% and may even decline in Europe. (The U.S. – which is on pace to consume 20.9 million barrels a day this year, up less than 1% from last year – remains the world's single largest consumer.)
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– Wall Street Journal |
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