An executive summary of weekly news from a US peak oil perspective, featuring:
- Production and Prices

- Iran

- Nigeria

- China

- In the Congress

- Energy Briefs

The answer might as well be yes. Their smallish medium-term growth possibilities are well-delineated. Longer term growth will require levels of investment that are not likely to to be forthcoming in time.

A chart-fest showing the balance between countries who expanded their production compared to the previous year and those whose production declined. Note the difference between the strong growth years around 2004 and the very slight decline experienced in the last two years when the scales have been nearly 'balanced'.

Fuel prices alone are unlikely to bring America to its senses. It clearly will take outright shortages with lines at the pumps, curtailed deliveries and many other misfortunes before serious measures –- speed limits, rationing, mandatory car pools, improved mass transit -- are taken.

Ali al-Naimi, oil minister for the world's largest crude producer, Saudi Arabia, and one of the oil industry's most influential figures, has been discussing Peak Oil.

I understand that the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO) will not always be invited to speak at CERA Week (Cambridge Energy Research Associates annual conference in Houston), but if I had been invited I could have discussed the CERA 2006 forecast of future oil production.

Prior to writing the article “The End of Cheap Oil” for the March 1998 issue of Scientific American magazine, Colin Campbell and I wrote four important oil and gas studies totaling about 1350 pages. After publication, our article was chosen as one out of 25 stories in the book Censored 1998, published by Sonoma State University.

China has leapfrogged to where we in the West will be within a decade: using coal to power our economies and cities as conventional worldwide oil production continues to decline.

The size of each country on this map reflects the relative size of its oil reserves.

It’s as if, facing the firing squad of $100/barrel oil, some CEOs, oil ministers, and energy experts have decided to come clean. Still, in some boardrooms, at the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, denial still rules. The last foxhole of the dead enders remains “increased recovery factors.”