(2004-06-08) Naparstek End Cheap Oil

Aaron Naparstek gives a good intro to the end of Cheap Oil. America never again produced as much as it did in 1970, despite a drilling boom that produced four times more oil wells each year. Since then, oil production has been in steady, rapid decline - the downhill side of Hubbert's bell curve (Hubberts Peak). Today, we extract about 3.4 million barrels per day from the lower 48, about one-third of what we were getting at peak... US oil demand sets a new record every few months... Global discovery peaked in 1964 and has declined ever since... Just as Hubbert predicted for the U.S., a decline in discovery presages a decline in production. Says Colin Campbell: "If you add it all together, you get a peak of what I call ordinary oil in 2005 and a peak of unconventional oil in around 2007. By 2010 volatility comes to an end. Then, terminal decline."... The Middle East accounts for nearly one-third of the world's total daily oil supply, and as other oil provinces reach their peak and begin to decline, that share is growing. Saudi Arabia alone controls one-quarter of these reserves... The bottom line is that analysts don't have enough data to know what the suppliers of the world's most vital economic resource can or cannot provide in the coming years... His (Matthew Simmons) final assessment of the Saudis is chilling. "We could be on the verge of seeing a collapse of 30 or 40 percent of their production in the imminent future, and imminent means sometime in the next three to five years - but it could even be tomorrow. If we need a plan B, it would sure be nice to know that with a little bit of advance warning."... "The whole Archer Daniels Midland model of turning oil into corn into Taco Bell-that whole complex, that system, is really going to be over," says James Howard Kunstler. "We're going to be forced to grow more of our food locally and return to a kind of agriculture that really hasn't been practiced here in a long time. A lot of the land that has only had value as suburban development in the past 30 or 40 years is going to have to be reassigned." Likewise, Kunstler foresees "the demise of WalMart style, big box, national chains." Companies whose profit margins depend on "merchandise made by factories 12,000 miles away" simply won't function in a world of $100-plus barrels of oil. "We're going to have to seriously reorganize our Whole System of retail trade (Big Retail) and economy."