Oil demand could outpace Saudi production capacity

Can you say PEAK OIL?



The world’s only oil superpower boosted output last month, launching a pair of projects that are part of a massive $55 billion (Ð45.59 billion) endeavor to keep pace with the world’s ever-intensifying thirst for oil.

But demand for the world’s premiere source of energy is rising so fast - by around 2 million barrels per day each year - that even Saudi Arabia’s vast resources will be unable to cope without drastic help, oil executives and analysts say.

Remarkably, even Saudis, who control over a quarter of the world’s known oil, are calling for relief from relentless consumption... http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2006/April/middleeast_April81.xml§ion=middleeast

at 20.00 a barrel it was too expensive to extract and process and only light crude is included in the reserve calculations, at 50.00 per barrel it is not and you have to include it and venezuela has far larger reserves than saudi, iraq, iran...in fact larger than the entire middle east combined. enough to last 100-200 years by all accounts.
not just venezuela but also canada.

so peak oil may be a myth. just the peak of extremely cheap oil.

Continued oil consumption is a recipe for the ecological disaster that's already beginning. And abandoning oil suddenly would be economically disastrous.

Honest, humane leadership, anyone?

sorry to tell you- but it's not only the economics that makes low quality hydrocarbons (like the bitumen in the Orinoco oil belt) problematic- it's the energy needed to extract it and refine it. The EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) is somewhere around 2 to 3. Maybe. That means that it takes tons of energy to get only a little more back. It's easily quadruple that (or more) for most conventional oil etracted

It also takes a long time to develop whatever amounts of the resource you can recover. 20% is often the rough number tossed around. You don't just pump this stuff out of the ground. So, when you look at the net energy replacement alongside the tremendous scale and increasing demand and depletion rates for conventional oil, the math does not look good.

http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/9/21/1156/96411

Venezuela holds 90% of the world's extra heavy crude oil - deposits which have to be turned into synthetic light crude before they can be refined and which only become economic to operate with the oil price at about $40 a barrel.

They need alot of energy to produce this heavy oil into usable energy.

Check out the oil drum for more information.. http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/4/3/05018/60079#comments