 Of the 65 largest oil producing countries in the world, up to 54 have passed their peak of production and are now in decline, including the USA in 1970/1, Indonesia in 1997, Australia in 2000, the North Sea in 2001, and Mexico in 2004.
This from Commodity Online, who have an excllent primer on Peak Oil. There is now consensus in the oil industry that peak oil is real and we are somewhere around the peak now. Thus, oil will increasingly be harder to get at and consequently more expensive. That’s just the supply side. On the demand side, India and China are modernizing quickly and need increasing amounts of oil.
So, we need a worldwide effort into providing cheap, clean transportation. Hybrids would certainly be one way. If tens of millions of autos were getting 40-50 mpg rather than 20, demand for oil would drop substantially. Ditto for implementing mass transit as much as possible.
I realized that ‘people’ always blame India and China for the surge of demand of oil. That’s only half truth. Many rich investors especially in the US put their money on oil because they know that oil is in fact very valuable. By doing so, they are actually buying oil and thus the oil companies got to keep those bought oil in reserves. Alan Greenspan wrote in his book that this act of oil buying by investors is the cause of oil price surging and hasten the price of oil to >100 dollars a barrel. I think that itself is open to debate as if investors do not play with the oil price, maybe in a few years alternative energy would boom and thus balance the price of oil. So it is not India and China’s demand for oil which is fueling the increase in oil prices. At least not for now.