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China Oil Demand Projected To Hit 11 MM/bpd By 2015, Up 25% From Now; Will Reach Consumption Parity With US By 2030
With the topic of oil once again dominating the air waves courtesy of Goldman's most recent flip flop on Brent, we look at one of those thing that few if any have actually done much analysis on over the past decade, namely supply and demand. As it is no secret that the primary driver in price formation of virtually all commodities has been excess liquidity, the actual fundamentals have been drowned for a long time. Yet they still remain. Of all "demand fundamentals", the biggest one is and will be China. Should the world indeed proceed to tighten across the globe, the question of Chinese demand will increasingly become one of substantial importance. Here is how Platts sees Chinese oil demand in the next several years: "China's demand for oil will grow 4-5% a year to hit 530 million-560
million mt (10.6 million b/d-11.3 million b/d) in 2015, with transport fuel
and chemical feedstocks driving the increase, a senior Chinese researcher
said Wednesday." Platts estimates that China's current oil consumption is about 450 million mts, a 12.2% increase over the past year. And following 2015, "Growth will then slow to 2%-3% a year, to reach 590 million-650 million
mt by 2020, said Liu Xiao Li of the Energy Research Institute, part of
China's economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform
Commission. With oil production in 2020 expected to be 200 million-230 million mt,
that would imply an import dependence of around 65%, she added." One can thus see why China is ever so cautious proceeding to procure E&P exposure and infrastructure projects around the world: the country realizes that without a friendly foreign "import" base, there is no way it can grow into its energy demand. Lastly, for those who collect parity facts, "in a presentation at the International Air Transport
Association's Aviation Fuel Forum, Standard Chartered Bank said China would
overtake Europe as the world's second largest consumer of oil before 2020,
with around 13 million-14 million b/d of demand. The bank's data indicates China would catch up with the US sometime
after 2030. Standard Chartered's data has China's oil demand approaching 17
million b/d around that year and still rising, with US oil demand around 18
million b/d and falling." Luckily by then we should have far more evidence whether the Peak Oil theory is indeed true, in which case the world will have far greater problems in the next 19 years than anything seen to date.
More from Platts:
China's strategy to mitigate the risk associated with such a high dependence on imports includes efforts to improve energy conservation and efficiency; increased focus on domestic exploration and production; increased investments in oil and gas abroad; diversification of import sources; and the development of alternative transport fuels.
The NDRC's research showed that China's apparent oil and oil product consumption in 2010 was 449 million mt, up 12.2% over 2009.
China does not release official oil demand statistics, and reporting agencies often have differing figures for the country's apparent oil demand.
Platts calculates the country's oil demand based on official data on refiners' crude throughput and net oil product imports.
Platts' analysis for 2010 put China's apparent oil demand up 11.43% year- on-year at a record 434.40 million mt, or an average 8.71 million b/d.
Transport fuel made up 65% of the demand and agriculture and fishing 15%, said the NDRC's Liu; and crude oil imports were at 236 million mt in 2010, up 19% over 2009. Import dependence last year was 53.8%.
As a benchmark, "US demand for crude oil and other liquid fuels is currently running
about 19 million b/d."
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Peak oil IS true, it's just a question of timeline.
Conventional peaked in 2006, according to the IEA.
While I don't doubt that peak oil production has occurred, supply will never peak, as it is just a question of timeline.
Simply put, oil is abiotic, else Russia would not be one of the world's largest producers. See, they drill deeper than the dinosaurs have EVER roamed.
It will be harder to find and more expensive to extract. The world is running out of cheap oil.
Abiotic is absolute bollocks, but even if it wasn't, please explain how come the North Sea is a largely tapped resource, AND how come you know the abiotic oil processes produce as much oil as we use on an annual basis - because if it doesn't, we'll still hit peak.
Abiotic oil is real. It's just the rate that is unknown, and is probably WAY too slow to help us out.
Methane is being produced on Mars for Christ's sake. Methane is also produced via serpentization reactions on Earth. Throw in a truly enormous biomass of deep dwelling microbes that consume said methane, and you have "abiotic" oil (ie oil that was not produced via sublimation of huge masses of photosynthetic microorganisms). The existence of these microbes have been proved. They exist a kilometer under the Earth's crust, at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles from the nearest subduction zone.
The methane produced via the serpentization reactions that feed those microbes, on the other hand, is likely enough to supply us for quite some time, similar to the reliability of the Sun (though perhaps an order of magnitude or two less so). It isn't hard to turn natgas into liquid fuel, if need be.
You should be ashamed. You know better than this.
tmosely, you are an idiot. Oil and NG on earth was produced by cooking phytoplankton (a type of algae) under high temperature and pressure for millions of years. Oil is not abiotic on earth.
How did the algae end up seven miles under solid rock nowhere near the edges of the tectonic plates in the Gulf of Mexico?
Abiotic is bollocks because it isn't taught in western schools.
EK
Forget it. "Some minds are like cement all mixed up and permanently set"
Convincing people that Abiotic oil is Bullshit, is like convincing a born again Christian that the world is older than 10,000 years. or that man wasn't around when T Rex walked the planet.
Like explaining that Oil DIDN'T come from Dinosaurs that it came from shallow seas and one celled creatures settling at the bottom for million years....
hundreds of millions or billions....the problem is that these types of timescales are incomprehensible.
Yeah, the Russian petroleum engineers and scientists can't comprehend millions or billions
People who believe that oil came from dinosaurs are like people who believe in the toothfairy, unicorns, and bigfoot. There is no evidence that can convince them otherwise. They are today's flat earthers.
Well.... just so its known. Deeper doesn't imply age of the rock... But i'll give you the benefit of the doubt you don't mean literally what you're saying...
Oil doesn't come from dinosaurs, it comes from micro-organisms in the ocean. I think you're confusing regular oil exploration with Russian SCIENTIFIC efforts to drill the deepest holes possible e.g. down to +10km depth.
It's about Return on Energy Invested. In the early days, sweet crude could be found and pulled out of the ground by a guy swinging a pickaxe (extremely low discovery cost).
Imagine how much energy it takes to boil tar sands to extract the tiny amount of oil there.
Also, your statement makes no sense. We only care about production because that is all we can use. The idea that we would reach a peak and then have some very long plateau is ridiculous.
you very clearly don't know what "supply" means
We are grappling with peak oil right now, that is one reason things are so screwed up. We just have yet to acknowledge this fact because we have not started down the steep slope, so the reality of peak oil is concealed behind other, more immediate threats. The reality is that Chinese consumption is growing while US consumption is shrinking. This is happening because there is not enough to go around. We all talk about monetary policy here without recognizing that a major contributor to that policy is the quest for oil.
TPOG
Agree with peak oil == screwed up.
We have exponential growth for demand in China and India. In fact, any country that wants "growth" is going to need energy to support the activities of that growth. So growth, in and of itself an exponential function, increases demand exponentially. Of course things like efficiency could help.
So we have expectations of economies to grow in an exponential fashion, meeting peak oil. Welcome to 2008 recession redux, where $150 per barrel of oil brought growth to a screeching halt.
In other words growth, for the economy at large, is dead.
There's also going to be lots of squabbling over who gets their straw into which of the remaining milkshakes for the final suck.
The credit bubble peaked in 2006. The current largest consumer economy (USA) hasn't recovered yet. Furthermore, the US Government has not stopped demand destruction domestically, or kept proper pace with E&P permitting to prevent intermediate term supply issues.
Chinese GDP growth has averaged 9.65% since at least 1993. Furthermore, China can revalue its currency to decrease acquisition cost, or just trade the tons of shit it manufacturers that otherwise would be sold to Americans who will soon no longer be able to afford it.
There are huge areas where the the only obstacle to efficient E&P is legal or political as opposed to economic or geological. Unfortunately, the only such zones that the US is in the front of the receiving line for are: Alaska, the US territorial waters & continental shelf, and the US-Canada maritime disputed areas. There is also the polar border region and the associated resource access dispute but there are more parties involved so the percentage share for the US would be smaller, barring an abnormally advantageous dispute resolution. For the remaining several dozen disputed production areas the US is not generally BFF with either of the parties involved, especially compared to China or Japan.
2006 is not any peak due to geological limitation. However, cheap USD denominated oil available to US consumers may be thing of the past.
They will be there by the end of the decade.
Not without some serious military investment they won't.
China's demand and China's consumption will be very different things unless they can increase hegemony in the Mideast. And that's more than a decade away by any measure. 2030... maybe. But they have an enormous amount of ground to cover. China has nukes, but their conventional military isn't up to snuff even at a domestic level. Their ability to project (conventional) power globally is weak at best.
Within 10 years, it will be clear that they're going to get there. But they won't actually be there for 20-30.
at some point, china will stop building vacant cities, right? then oil demand there falls 20%? 30%? 50%?
Well, how much did it fall in the US ? Then apply ratio ...
Not if their population wants to keep moving toward a more Western lifestyle. Let's not forget agricultural inputs either.
Of course by 2030 oil will be 34534/barrel (dollars?)
34534 dollars, or 10 ounces of silver.
Silver which the Party of Brotherhood and Heavenly Socialism will one day prohibit, ban and persecute.
Black Marketzz
This and the Goldman story are tricking dumb money into going long
Charts say oil poised to fall
http://deadcatbouncing.blogspot.com/
Hmmm...China will consume more and more oil as their economy grows?? Very interesting.
Never saw this coming!/sarc( Light sweet PEAK CHEAP OIL IS true ). 'Lectric cars? Batteries need silver, $36 an ozt sure is expensive, 'till it's not.
China can demand in one hand and nightsoil in the other to see which fills up faster. Emerging demand bitchez!
No, it won't. There isn't enough oil supply for this to happen.
+100
+100
Couldn't you just have posted +200 once?
Even more bullish for the long bond.
Well maybe, now the rubber has to meet the road. The good news is that these are real numbers related to emerging demand that will be hard to conceal. Finding truth in any economic report is difficult these days. Are quarterly reports even remotely trustworthy anymore?
They will burn it, we will breathe it. Downwinders for all of the industrial shit that follows the jet stream over to the good ole USA. Made In China - whole new meaning to imports! Add that to your Fukushima cesium, etc. Made In Japan - support your local Pacific Rim country imports!
at the moment, americans are burning a lot more of it in total and per person than any other country. so dont get on too tall a soapbox.
Nice try, but no. America is somewhere around #22 in per capita oil consumption.
source?
ahh, 2030. When children are born with more or less 20 digits. When there is no more edible seafood or farm animal to consume. When the air isn't fit to breathe and this is only if, they shut down the reactors and place the spent fuel where it can't kill us unless the whole planet is killled by something larger.
The optimism without solutions is difficult. When no solutions are moving forward, we spend our remaining time in reverse. How does devo get turned around to allow anything but fissionophilic organisms to survive? One might be wise to avoid long term plans if we allow those in power to stay there.
Blah blah blah..... whatever.
"One might be wise to avoid long term plans "
No need to plan past May 21st. No, no, make that October 21st. Sorry.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_apocalypse_saturday
It turns out it's pretty easy to get people to believe you when they already believe in fairy tales.
Chinese oil demand is growing by 10% a year, not some 4-5%, which means that China will overtake US as the biggest oil consumer within a decade.
China's strategy to mitigate the risk associated with such a high dependence on imports includes efforts to improve energy conservation and efficiency...
A Sinopec gas station in Suzhou city of Anhui province pumped 45 liters of gas into a 35 liter gas tank http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/pictures/sinopec-gas-station-pumps-45l-into-35l-gas-tank.htmlEfficiency, bitchezzz!!!
Chinese oil demand is growing by 10% a year, not some 4-5%, which means that China will overtake US as the biggest oil consumer within a decade, I´d say.
You're assuming perpetual 10% growth. The US was growing very fast until it didn't
People should check out the movie "Blind Spot"... instant download for those of you on Netflix. One point that stuck with me... modern agriculture has become an equation of converting petrolium into food for consumption. A scary proposition, really. The average distance our food travels before we consume it has increased something like 500 fold over the past couple of generations... it works when it's working, but when it doesn't.
how could the 'peak oil theory' not be true? it is simply stating the bleeding obvious that at some point, the rate of oil extraction will start to decline for good. personally, i cannot see why anyone would consider that a controversial idea, or a useful one to think about.
you might just as well debate the 'peak population theory' ie that at some point the population of Earth will reach a maximum.
Related, how cheap oil began, courtesy the USA, 15 mins each, fantastic info sprinkled w/ Standard oil "helping the poor ME ers" propaganda circa 1958:
http://www.archive.org/details/DesertVe1958 and... http://www.archive.org/details/DesertVe1958_2
Seeing how most cars will be run by batteries.....which furthermore will be produced in China.....because of rare earth advantages......one may find this oil demand projection a wee bit flawed .....
Must have been done by some GS juiced Ivy League economist helping to make some trades happen.....
"Seeing how most cars will be run by batteries."
Are you talking about the cheap radio-controlled ones? I'd bet you are. If not, then there is a lot more hope-and-change and pixie dust in your imagination than most care to sort through.
http://www.plugincars.com/tesla-will-unveil-electric-suv-2011-and-30k-electric-car-2015-106704.html
These guys will have plenty of competition as well.....
Make no mistake.....
When you no longer have to buy gas....or pay an electric bill....even people like you might be doing it.....
I will buying the SUV all electric.....from somebody.....and I am going solar 100% in my house.....
I just reduced my oil footprint big time......
The battery price is going to come down big time......will be cheap.....and more plentiful and available than oil......
My solar air ....panels ...etc...all from China.....
Why the fuck do you use "...." so liberally? Are you getting paid per "...."?
EDIT: Sorry, I meant "....." not "...."
Ummmm.... How much fossil fuel does it take to create a battery. How much to make composites ? It takes energy to mine rare earths. It takes rare earth metals to create an efficient battery. It takes energy to make composites also. Oh yeah... they are finite too. I have heard although I don't know if it's true that the carbon footprint to build a Prius is thrice what it is to build a HumV.
That could be decades away. There are still huge technological issues that need to be addressed
"Will Reach Consumption Parity With US By 2030"
Sure, they'll use as much as we do - but will they use it with the same flair and panache?
"Sure, they'll use as much as we do - but will they use it with the same flair and panache?"
Doubtful...we have the market cornered on wastefulness and conspicuous consumption...and have for quite some time.
AAA+
Ferrari, Rolls Royce, Bentley, Lamborghini, and over ten other top-end famous luxury cars drove by one after another in a line. But this isn’t for the “2011 Shanghai Auto Show”, but rather a luxury car wedding motorcade in Wenzhou.
http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/stories/wenzhou-wedding-motorcade-worth-hundreds-of-millions-rmb.html
Sweet. "Truck my Rolex while I cruise the proj...ject".
sure...vast fortunes have been made by those appropriately connected to the corruptocracy
China’s Utilities Cut Energy Production, Defying Beijing
Or why price fixing is a bad idea:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/business/energy-environment/25coal.htm...
Doesn't price have an effect on consumption? Or maybe consumption will continue at the current pace regardless of whether the price is $50/bbl, $100/bbl, $200/bbl, or $500/bbl??
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/feds-duke-americas-poor-have-make-choice-between-paying-their-gas-and-their-mortgage
People who say things like "by 2030" are under a static/linear delusion, believing that the dynamics that created current trends can continue indefinitely, even though the underpinnings of those dynamics will surely be destroyed long before the trend goes out that far. Oil usage parity predictions, Social Security and Medicare actuarial predictions, and any prediction that is highly dependent on growth, productivity, and technology are little more than speculation. I "predict" China will use more oil than the US in less than ten years as the US appetite is constrained by our ability to pay sound money for it.
Electric cars is a nice thought. Unfortunately electricity isn't a form of energy, it's merely a transmitter of energy from one point to another. take all of the BTU's expended on the TRANSPORTATION INDUSTRY and apply them to a power grid? How many new coal/natural gas fired power plants would have to be erected in order to handle this load? Not to mention the power grid itself.
One charges batteries via solar as we speak....
Cars WILL be charged by the sun.....
NOT THE GRID.....
By 2030.....it will be much sooner than 2030....
Can't wait to see how much panels and batteries will cost when everyone who wants to drive needs to buy a car and charging system. See: Peak rare-earth metals. . .
Marketfox is living in fantasyland. Electric will be fantastic for mass-transit systems. We will need to find another means for individual transportation. Horse and buggy maybe ?? Maybe they'll get that "Teleporter" thingy figured out.
Silver is going for the triple tap upward on $36.25 resistance as we speak. I expect all the stops to get pulled out on a second go-for-broke price reduction attack (second of the day at least). Let's see if it works. If not, expect silver to start moving toward $40, and the CME to ready it's last bullet in the chamber (TMOAMH - the mother of all margin hikes). Shit is fucking epic.
EDIT: The beachball keeps getting up as they punch it down. Hilarious. I'm guessing it continues up till the bell. Asian market is going to take it past through.
EDIT: And, it's gone. Up a third time through to $36.60. I doubt it'll get beaten back down.
EDIT: Yet another triple test near the close at $36.60. This is better than watching a movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E&feature=related
China's Ghost Cities and Malls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qbb0NvU79L0
Commercial real estate bubble in China
are they going to fill up tanks at gas stations.. with no customers to hit that number?
Hey, Charleton Heston had it right in Soylent Green after all - think recycle!
In other energy news, TEPCO's #1 reactor reading went from 40 sieverts to 200 (internal chamber), then to 200 on the _drywall_. 200 sieverts is basically "death ray" like radiation. You see it, and your dead (1 will give you nausea after a few hours, and probably kill you of cancer after a few hours, 4 will make you lie down and die, 200 is wery wery wery bad).
The graph is labeled 5/24, today.
http://enenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/drywell200.jpg
I understand it takes 6 hours to eat through the concrete. After that, 15 feet of earth until it hits the groundwater. At that point we get a huge geyser of radioactive material.
If someone is taking any video of this in Japan, well it will make interesting news in the next 24 hours.
We're in uncharted territory folks, but this event will probably be combined with the ideas "worse than Chernobyl," and "China Syndrome."
200 lol...the Chernobyl liquidators were exposed to rad fields as strong as 100 sv/h (of course they had lead all over). They just could only spend a teenie bit of time up on the roof less than a minute at a time. I think they underestimated the radiation levels and were targeting them to receive half a sv per trip. Some took a few trips up.
After coming down they said they felt as if they had been attacked by vampires.
There were people at the plant who ambled into 100sv rad fields as well. A lot of them died.
Figure out how to get electricity without fossil fuels. Not happening until there is a major discovery in energy production that makes petroleum the buggy whip - and the current oil tzars ain't gonna let that happen without a fight.
If such a form of energy is accessable to us. . .
just like the whale oil barons stopped rock oil, eh?
You can't stop it. Nobody has the power.
Chinese oil consumption and Chinese oil demand, like US oil consumption and US oil demand, will diverge.
The US will never accept relentless decline of lifestyle so that Chinese can have increase of lifestyle. US parents will never accept relentless misery for their children so that Chinese children can have improvement.
When there's not enough to go around, no one "makes do with less". That's what militaries are for. You don't make do with less. You eliminate competing consumption.
Soon.
As with coal; it doesn't really matter if we run out of oil or not. The key issue is whether it becomes economically viable to explore and produce. Another global credit problem would crater demand for years and with about 10 banks left standing, and the oil corporations decimated, the peak oil issue would disappear at around $30 a barrel.
Regardless,
Peak Oil = End Of Growth
Period.
Price is completely irrelevant.
We will NEVER pump more per day than we are right now.
EVER again. $200 per barrel, or $30 per barrel.
There will be less oil produced each year from this point forward.
END OF GROWTH = DEMAND REVERSES = TIME TO FIND SOLUTION
"There will be less oil produced each year from this point forward."
This assumes that demand doesn't shrink faster than oil production. If demand plummets faster than production, production will be able to meet the shrunken demand, and we could see the same production for some years in a row.
"We will NEVER pump more per day than we are right now."
In 2005 the world produced 73.4 mbpd. We have not produced that much since. If in the future you read that we have topped that number, just remember WMD.
As a Canuck I say Ka-Ching! of course even if the CDN dollar was worth 2 USDs a new car would cost more in Canada.
I'd like to go back to 2000-2004 and see what the 20 year projections were for US home prices, economic growth, the S&P, global trade volume, etc., etc.
Monkeys and a dart board have the the same probability of accuracy as these kinds of projections...
hahaha .. it's funny cause it's true.
I guess all this doesn't make any assumption about china crashing and being exposed for the fraud that it, and its banking sector, are??
oil will not be needed by 2030
." Luckily by then (2030) we should have far more evidence whether the Peak Oil theory is indeed true, in which case the world will have far greater problems in the next 19 years than anything seen to date.
With all due respect Tyler Durden, if we don't come out of this recession -- and to read your criticism of Bernanke and Geithner, it appears you think we are drowning in a sea of QE ink -- in a couple of years, that'll be the turning point Deutsche Bank was talking about.
What you have to understand is that as far as the psychology of the human race is concerned, next to telling them about an immenent nuclear exchange, the depeltion of crude oil supplies with out a adequate substitute is the worse thing they can hear.
So blame the slowing of growth on the economy, on Bernanke and Geithner, on the fact that even with Viagra, the erect penis is not entering the vagina and off loading its seed with the frequency required for population growth.
Or you can say, "It is the best of times; it is the worst of times."
One type of kerogen comes from plankton, there are others. The carbon content of our planet's crust is a mix. It doesn't take as long to cook kerogen as many think. As for volume - if each cubic kilometer of the top two of the earth's crust produced one cubic centimeter of oil per day it would equal our current production/consumption, caveat - the planet got a 300 million year head start accumulating cooked kerogen byproducts. Peak oil, schmeek oil, that was one cubic centimeter per cubic kilometer, 300 million year head start, just a mental exercise to help appreciate life on a carbon rich planet. Check the math. And yes we've recently begun harvesting it from the individual flecks of organic matter in the liquids rich shale plays, yes it is economic, and no, having discovered the 7th largest oil field on earth in Texas two years ago is not convenient for the Peakers, but who cares.
The Cantarell field in Mexico started to tap out after 30 years of production. Just 30 years. So much promise.
Ghawar, Saudi Arabia's Big Bertha, is starting to produce more slowly -- or is it? Why so secret?
NMD (Numbers of Mass Deception, you think?)
"Relatively little is known about Ghawar because the company and Saudi government closely guard field performance information and per-field production details. Available information is predominantly historical (pre-nationalization), from incidental technical publications, or anecdotally."
And how many barrels of real oil does it take to produce a barrel of shale oil? More than one i bet.
"7th largest oil field on earth." I wonder where those numbers came from?
Just more NMD.
Probably Pollyanna.
It's not in a producer's interest to be transparent or to talk up their own production capabilities as it drives down the price they receive for their commodity.
China completing stages 2 & 3 of their SPR may provide an opportunity to do some calculations based on tanker data. If the destabilization threat of MENA contagion remains, but war does not break out between Iran and Saudi Arabia or their proxies, then the Saudis will have serious motivation to fill the Chinese SPR as quickly as their production actually allows.
Certainly it is not in the interest of the producer of crude oil to be transparent when it comes to the price the producer wants to receive. But with such a vital commodity so necessary for human existence, there are also official concerns which demand not only intransparency, but a little disinformation as well.
Here in America, for example, if it became public knowledge that global oil production was running down and there was no substitute readily available, a panic and disruption similar to a run on a bank would probably occur.
Not that there would be lines at gas stations, but that an anxiety and sense of doom would soon through contagion overwhelm everyone not in the military or in government.
There would be a dislocation and disruption that would make The Reign of Terror look like a Christmas Parade.
Definitely not a topic for the Peak Oil Scaredy Cats
Time will tell.
Peak Oil Geologists as so full of shit, they use world maps with huge sections blacked out so you can't tell what's underneath and call it "science". It is about as honest as Transitory Inflationists (central bankers) using Housing and iPods that no one is buying very much of to deny the existence of inflation.
"I’m just gonna let you pass
Yes, and I’ll go last
Then time will tell who fell
And who’s been left behind
When you go your way and I go mine"
Are you really calling M. King Hubbert full of shit? Houses and iPods are being built every day. All of the easy to find, easy to drill oil deposits that were created during first eons of this planet have been discovered. Oil production ran down in this country; it will run down every where.
Denial is understandable.
"7th largest oil field on earth." I wonder where those numbers came from?
Just more NMD.
Probably Pollyanna.
Sure as hell didn't come from chicken little (Peakers). "Oh we're running out of oil, oh gasoline cost too much, oh oil companies make too much profit."
You won't find Pollyanna in the oil patch. There may be a lot of dreamers, but Pollyannas I have not seen, and I'm looking. I like Pollyanna.
I know you like Pollyanna. And there's nothing wrong with that.
It was never my intention to tease the scaredy cats, only to bring this unpleasant 'news' to the attention of the wise and wonderful Durden & Co.
Having done so, I will try to shut up about it, and remind you that talking about 'peak oil' only hastens the problems associated with it.
Until such time as production and demand return to 2005 levels, we must asume the worst.
Abiotic oil is real. Otherwise you have to believe that all the dinosaurs died in mass graves.
If abiotic oil is really real, doesn't it beg the question of why all the empty wells we've pumped out, haven't replenished themselves like the wine jug of Baucis and Philemon?
The Chinese may increase oil demand all they whish - the only way of actually getting more of the stuff is to out-bid someone else. Oil production will never increase again.
And in order to out bid everyone else, they'd have to have more reserve currency than everybody else.
Will we be undone by all those cheap plastic toys at Walmart?
Egad.
Sooo... oil into China, converted to junk soldat Walmart for fiat money. The world economy has become a big factory for converting valuable and non-renewable resources into junk sold at Walmart.... hmmm...
I'm just the messenger, don't blame me. As a matter of fact, if you want to you can blame the early 20th century capitalists who didn't give a rat's ass whether there would be enough fuel for their internal combustion engine in 100 years.
They had not a care for the generations that followed them. They wanted to make money and they ground out automobiles to do so.
Henry Ford destroyed the world.