GAIL TVERBERG

The IMF is to be commended on putting together this analysis. The big step forward is that questions about the impact of geological depletion of oil on the economy are starting to be addressed. The fact that the paper also points out the level to which oil prices will need to rise, if oil production is to rise at 0.9% a year between now and 2020, is important as well. However, some important issues are not addressed in the paper.

Five forces have helped enable long-term economic growth, we are now reaching limits in all of them. Thus, while these factors have tended to create growth in the past, the same factors cannot be relied on to produce growth in the future. In fact, they may lead to a turn around in the not-too-distant future.

Countries trade crude oil and oil products back and forth. When all of these transactions are netted out, is the US close to becoming a “net” oil exporter?

With the recent increase in oil production (perhaps even exceeding that of Russia on a “barrels-per-day” basis), a person might think that US oil production problems are behind us. If we look at the data, though, it is very clear that the US is still a long way from becoming a net oil exporter.

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently released full-year 2011 world oil production data. In this post, I would like show some graphs of recent data, and provide some views as to where this leads with respect to future production.

We live in a world with very limited solutions to our sustainability problems. I often hear the view, "If we would just get off fossil fuels, then our society would be sustainable." Or, "If the price of oil would just go high enough, then renewables would become economic, and our economy would be sustainable."

Unfortunately, our problems with sustainability began a long time before fossil fuels came around, and the views above represent an incomplete understanding of our predicament.

In this post, I provide...charts showing long-term changes in energy supply, together with some observations regarding implications. One such implication is how economists can be misled by past patterns, if they do not realize that past patterns reflect very different energy growth patterns than we will likely see in the future.

This time around, Europe, and in particular the Eurozone, is the area of the world getting hit the hardest by high oil prices. Part of this has to do with the relative level of the Euro and the US dollar.

In the end, it may not matter which countries were first and most affected by limited oil supply and high oil prices. It will be all of us that feel the impact.

Rising oil and gasoline prices are of concern to many people today. I see three basic issues involved: "Stalled out" growth in world oil supply, concerns about Iran, and artificially low interest rates. In my view, the biggest contributor to high oil prices is the first one--stalled out oil supply. At this point, the interaction between oil demand and oil supply does not work in the way most people expect it would. Even if the price of oil rises, world oil production doesn't increase by very much, if at all.

In the past month, three major peer-reviewed journals have published articles relating to limited world oil supply. This is significant, because articles in the mainstream press, such as Bloomberg in a recent article , seem to suggest that our oil problems are past. While the US oil supply situation may be a little better, the world supply situation is still very bad, and oil prices are still very high around the world.

On January 26, Bloomberg Businessweek printed an editorial by Charles Kenny titled, "Everything You Know About Peak Oil Is Wrong". This editorial reflects several common misunderstandings.