Peak Oil, again: Analyst points to declining production as key to $100 barrel oil

Triple-digit oil prices to become norm: analyst
By Steve Gelsi, MarketWatch

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Oil prices of at least $100 a barrel are expected to become the norm as early as next year, as conventional supplies continue to decline and consumption in the developing world rises, CIBC chief economist Jeff Rubin said Tuesday.
"We're in a world of triple-digit oil prices for the foreseeable future," Rubin said at the CIBC 2nd Annual Industrials Conference. "Whether it's $100 or $140 a barrel ... is up to debate, but the bottom line is we're in the bottom of the ninth inning of the hydrocarbon age."
Rubin said higher oil prices will spur technological innovations, as well as growth in nuclear power and biofuels.

snip:

Despite Wall Street's obsession with oil consumption by China and India, oil use in Russia, Mexico and the OPEC nations outpaced the world's most populous country last year.
In Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, for example, the retail cost of gasoline ranges around 25 cents a gallon -- cheap enough to consume in ever-larger quantities to fuel growth.
At the same time, oil-rich countries such as Kuwait and Mexico are starting to see declines in major oil field supplies, he said.


Six of the largest oil suppliers to the U.S. are poised to cut their global exports by nearly 2 million barrels a day by 2012, Rubin said.
The projected cut -- amounting to 7% -- by Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Algeria and Russia, "reflect the growing struggle in these countries to grow production and manage their own soaring rates of oil consumption," Rubin said.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/cibc-economist-predicts-triple-digit/story.aspx?guid=%7B2D5D7DA1%2D1C71%2D4FB3%2DAAE6%2DF4B66CDE7F63%7D

Maybe that will finally force us fat, lazy Americans out of our cars and onto public transit.

I have been saying for 25 years now that there needs to be a public transit system here to move people from the outlying counties into the city. There is nothing.

Folks in Minnesota and Wisconsin have been begging for light rail for years. There seems to be no way to get back to the way things were in the 40's and 50's.

100 years ago the little village down the road from my farm once had train service. Now the old rail right of way is a bike path.

Somehow I seriously doubt that bike path which connects Jefferson, Sullivan, Dousman, Wales, and Waukesha and once somehow connected thru to closer-in suburbs and Milwaukee is ever going to revert to commuter rail.

Why don't we move people out of the suburbs, and back into the city proper? I know people don't WANT to move out of a big house with a yard to an apartment, but with the rising costs of commuting, they are going to NEED to.

thats probably my fault more than yours because I didn't tell the long enough version of it.

So I apologize in advance for going off on a rant that lets off more steam than you need.

But, my fuse is burnt...assuming that everyone living in the periphery is in a McMansion is absurd.

That isn't to say that there are not McMansions out there, there are. And I've even seen gated communities with private guards out there north of Milwaukee...but really, out on the periphery (which because of the nature of the area under an arc with a larger radius is spread over a vast area compared to urban and suburban geography) most of the folks don't have big houses on hilltops from where they view pastoral expanses. Most folks out there live in small towns, villages and hamlets with quite modest homes and yards not unlike those found in urban and suburban subdivisions.

Most people out there have quite modest but working existances. Sending them to cities away from their jobs and lives is just a terrible idea. Your comment, which I'm sure was innocent enough, leaves overly sensitive me in misery of the lack of appreciation you have for the abyssmal consequences of your vision.

People live out there because their labor was or still is needed out there. These people have functional lives and functional if small communities out in those places.

Now, I would grant that much of life out on the periphery of the metropolitan areas in America is really endangered because industry has cut and run. But the people who live out there are not aliens from another space time continuum. They are pretty much just like us.

Every generation living out there makes decisions to get educated and move to lives elsewhere and so the balance of work and residency is adjusted without social planners. Really, the only difference I usually see is that marginally poor working class folks out there see themselves as more like middle class than they probably should. But, the solution isn't sending rural/small community residents into urban areas because there isn't public transportation.

Those folks have jobs and productive lives out on the periphery--it's the services (like doctors and major cancer/heart treatment centers) and the American retail experience that aren't out there in their typically American urban concentrations. Consequently folks living out there are forced to drive if they want to experience those services and opportunities.

Should we really construct a moral superiority for ourselves about public transportation that obtains a life for other people that denies them access to what we have in urban and suburban areas? I think not.

The point in my previous post was only this--urban planners and regional planners in many parts of the nation have cut these people off from access to public transportation. Those "experts," many of them voting democrats, think in terms of 'efficently' serving abstract populations rather than in addressing the needs of living breathing people who are geographically and thereby economically marginalized by yet more previous marginalizing planning.

That is unfortunately they way it's going t continue to be.

The story I related illustrates the reality that those wise planners still see the need for bike trails (i.e the value of many thousands of hours of recreations for suburbanites who live elsewhere) as more important than pubic inter-urban transport (many hundreds of hours of utilization of public transport). The planners and politicians have decided that the 'cost effective thing to do' is to leave the peripheral people to fend for their transportation needs at their own cost. I might be off the deep end, but that part seems to be reality.

And so it is my claim that it is hardly fair to call people names for successfully living on the periphery and for not using public transportation when society has decided that no public transportation will be made available.

I might add that not everyone is suited to high-density urban life and will have their spirits crushed by living cheek to jowl just as much as an urbanite would die if deprived of his or her favorite activities.

One's not better than the other, just different.

its not just suburban areas here...they have grown to where they now connect what used to be outlying cities in other counties. We are to the point where we could build a rail all the way from Ft. Wayne to Indianapolis.

She lives about 4 blocks from the "mall" that used to be the center of town, but all the stores closed and now the "mall" is all just Shasta County government offices. The democratic party HQ was in the basement for a while, but they moved into a storefront about 2 miles away last year.

The grocery store is a mile and a half away. The nearest bus stop that would take you to to grocery store is about 5 blocks away, in a direction perpendicular to the direction to the grocery store.

My mom's work is 5 miles away, and it's 6 minutes on the freeway but closer to 30 going through town. Needless to say, there is no direct bus route. The closest bus route would involve a 5-block walk on either end.

The shopping area with all the stores (unlike the "mall") is literally one mile away... on the other side of I-5. To get there walking or on a bike you'd have to go a mile and a half south, a mile east, and another mile and a half north. In the car it's two minutes with a headwind.

Redding has... unique... weather. July and August typically have more than 26 days each month above 90 degrees. In June and September it's more like 16 days in each month greater than 90. "Above 90" often means well over 100, and even sometimes over 110. In the winter we get about as much rain as Seattle.

If my mom's experience is the typical Redding experience, public transportation is a joke, and walking is totally nonviable.

I deeply suspect that this is the experience in most cities in the country. :shrug:

because it makes green technology affordable in comparision

Job Description: Back-breaking manual labor 16 hours a day. Experience with farm tools, livestock and overcoming malnutrition preferred. Broken spirits a must! Benefits include living quarters in the lofts above the cattle and hog barns (fresh straw costs extra), second-hand clothing with minimal pig shit stains, and 3 meals a day (meals may be composed entirely of gruel, potatoes and pig knuckles). Apply today!

No other reason.

Oil.