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OPEC and G-7 Officials to Examine Surging Oil Prices VOA News 21 May 2004, 15:26 UTC http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=DF6476A1-B4ED-41AD-94B2F7E8C2599962 Oil prices top the agenda at upcoming economic meetings in Amsterdam and New York, as oil consumers press producers to boost output in a bid to cut prices that have soared 40 percent in a year. Saturday in Amsterdam, members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries are set to discuss a Saudi Arabian proposal to pump an extra two million barrels of oil a day. But cartel members are already exporting more than their self-imposed production quotas, and some analysts wonder if the Saudi proposal would have much practical effect on supplies or prices. OPEC's president Purnomo Yusgiantoro blames the recent oil price surge on things that the cartel cannot control - including speculation, Middle East violence, U.S. refining problems and surging demand from China and other nations. Meantime, Group of Seven finance ministers are expected to take up the impact of soaring energy prices on the global economy at their meeting Saturday in New York. The G-7 is made up of the world's seven richest industrial nations. It accounts for two-thirds of the world's economic activity. Some information for this report provided by Bloomberg, AFP, AP, and Reuters. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ posted to Nat-enviro Apr 27th by Teresa Binstock Can you talk about the Hubbert oil curve and its implications? http://escribe.com/culture/native_news/m54927.html M. King Hubbert was a petroleum geologist whose life spanned most of the twentieth century. He was the most famous and renowned petroleum geologist of his time. He worked for Shell Oil Company and also taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UC Los Angeles, and a number of other schools. He was the first geologist to make a fairly accurate estimate of the total ultimately recoverable quantity of oil, first in North America, and then later on, in the world as a whole. He also was the first petroleum geologist to understand the principles of oil depletion. Hubbert realized that, for any given oil province, when about half the oil is gone production tends to peak. The reason for that is that we naturally we go after the easy, cheap oil first, and by the time about half of the total amount of oil is gone, the cheap, easy stuff tends to run out; then it becomes more difficult to extract what's left. So there's a bell-shaped curve to production that seems to apply across the board. Economic and political factors can change the shape of that curve: if there's a war or the price of oil changes or a country voluntarily decides to restrict exports, those can alter the oil extraction profile. But even so, what goes up must eventually come down, and so depletion can be mathematically modeled even if the graph is fairly bumpy. When Hubbert applied his methods to the United States, which was the world's foremost oil producing nation for many decades, he determined that the halfway point of extraction would occur around 1970. Sure enough, just as Hubbert predicted, U.S. oil production peaked in 1970, and it's been going down ever since. We're extracting about as much conventional onshore oil in the U.S. now as we were in 1940, which is much less than was being extracted in 1970, and that's the reason that we're more and more dependent upon imported oil from places like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iraq. Using Hubbert's method, it's also possible to predict when global oil production will peak. The scary thing is, the peak is likely not that far off. No one is absolutely sure, because it is impossible to determine exactly how much oil is yet to be discovered. Some countries have political motives for underreporting or overreporting their reserves. But the best guesses are that we're only a few years away from the global oil production peak. What will happen when we pass the peak of the Hubbert oil curve? Once we hit the peak, every year thereafter we will be unable to find and pump more oil. If the demand continues at the present rate or grows, the supply will be inadequate. And that will have tremendous economic implications for the whole world. As I explained earlier, our whole industrial way of life is largely based on petroleum. So either we have to find other energy sources to make up for what we lose from petroleum as it begins to run out, or else we will go into permanent economic decline with vast implications for the economy, food production, transportation, and so on. =========+========= FEEDBACK? http://nativenewsonline.org/Guestbook/guestbook.cgi WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT? 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