Indonesia considers quitting OPEC

Source: Earth Times

Jakarta - Indonesia, OPEC's only member in the Asia-Pacific, is considering quitting the cartel because the country has become a net oil importer, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said Tuesday. "Indonesia at this stage is no longer an oil exporter," Yudhoyono said in opening remarks at a conference attended by provincial governors and regency heads.

"That's why, at the cabinet meeting yesterday, we have discussed whether we should continue to stay with OPEC or withdraw our membership temporarily," Yudhoyono said, adding that the country needs to concentrate on increasing its domestic production.

He said the country's crude oil output has continued to drop and was now at 927,000 barrels per day because of declining investment in the oil sector. That figure was down from production of 950,000 barrels per day last year and represented a fall of more than 50 per cent from levels of a decade ago...

Read more: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/203418,indonesia-considers-quitting-opec.html

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Why are they quitting? They are running out of oil... :(

This is a very interesting aspect. I would like to hear more on this.

This is similar to the "price of oil is going up because of the devalued dollar" and it of course serves the Republicrats well. Blame the Democrats. Stop taxing the oil companies so much and they will drill for more oil. There's plenty of oil. The damn Democrats just don't want us to have it. They block everything. The Democrats and those damn environmentalists! And so it goes. And goes. And goes.

Reality is the major reserves are being depleted. Add Indonesia to the list of "net importers" along with Great Britain, Mexico, and of course the good old United States. We have no oil, really, so everyone else's oil is of course "ours" and those damn communists and Islamic fundamentalists and of course the Nigerians are all just a bunch of crooks trying to steal our oil from us. And so it goes. And goes. And goes.

The only truth in the statement that lack of investment is the cause of a decline in producing reserves is that the major oil companies and some of the "middlemen" who used to be the actual independents are finding it more and more expensive to explore and then put fields into production. But we must have oil. And so we will see $150 a barrel oil soon. Then $200. Then $250. That is probably the point at which our economy will simply collapse. No one will be able to afford gas, electricity or even groceries. Think it won't happen? Spend some time in the grocery store and really look at the prices that keep going up every month as the price of diesel goes up.

The big battle cry now is the Democrats and other assorted varmints who are enemies of the American people have blocked the construction of new refineries. No one has blocked any such thing. The major oil companies in particular are hardly going to invest billions of dollars in new refineries that may be sitting idle in 15-25 years because there is no longer the demand for oil because of the price per barrel and the price per gallon.

We are a very stupid people because we are a very selfish people. Even alternative energy in this country is developed only when it guarantees a good return. Profit is all. Welcome to the oligarchy.

The only country that had the foresight to accept the inevitable is Brazil. Which will get rich off its export of oil from the new Atlantic fields. They don't need it because 85% of its population fills up with ethanol at the pump instead of gasoline. And eventually, some say within 5 years, 100% of its population will.

Everyone else will be looking at $10 a gallon gas, then $15 a gallon gas, then $20 a gallon gas.

It is not just gasoline. It is electricity. We are completely oil dependent in this country. And this summer is going to bring a harsh reality to even the "middle-class" who probably will spend a long, hot summer with hand fans because they can't afford to run the air-conditioning.

And Nancy Pelosi will just shrug her shoulders and wink at George W Bush and tell everyone to blame the Republicans. At this point our Congress is no longer Democrats and Republicans. They are basically all Republicrats. Supporting the oligarchy that will be the legacy of the Bushes and the cause of the collapse of the American empire. The people may be Democrats or Republicans but their politicians are not.

She will be sitting there listening to him fiddle during the summer while the fire raging in Rome begins to consume Rome finally.

I am not arguing against Peak Oil, but in these times in which we live, the injection of a societal meme like Peak Oil would be very helpful for Disaster Capitalists' Long Crisis. It would provide a lot of cover for overheated specualative markets and make a lot of money for them.

Take Nigeria, for instance: Someone farts there and the price of oil goes up. Who is funding the mischief makers there? Who is giving them the material support?

The theory was actually called Hubbert's Peak and was a point of discussion, and ridicule, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But during the early 1970s those in the oil and gas industry began to notice that production in the United States was decreasing while demand was increasing which is one of the basic foundations of the theory.

It is no longer theory nor is it really a good foundation for conspiracy theories. We have been consuming more oil in this country than we produce since the early 1970s and 30 years later the world has begun consuming more oil than it produces. We have already peaked. We are in a depletion cycle. And that is the reality. All other things considered and all other things aside. We are running out of oil and what we have left will become more and more expensive to find and to produce.

There of course is market manipulation by speculators but the percentage ranges caused by such speculation are not sufficient to explain the increasing price of oil that is set by OPEC based on the very thing Hubbert based his theory on. Supply and demand.

We are running out of oil. Playtime is over. Enjoy the Hummer while you can.

This is bad news... $200 per barrel soon... Here comes the real trouble...

There are a finite supply of resources on planet earth. It has nothing to do with how much oil is in the ground, nor how much coal is available. As the easily available resources are used up, the cost and difficulty of retrieving more raw materials increases rapidly.

As the "cheap" supply of raw materials are used up, if, at the same time, you have an increase in demand for even more raw materials, the cost (price) increases even faster. The result is that all prices geared to oil as a primary source of energy will increase. Throw in an absurd use of a food crop to increase oil profits (ethanol) and a large number of people are going to be "priced out of the market".

We are already witnessing huge numbers of people starving because they can no longer afford a simple bowl of rice. This state of affairs has nothing to do with "peak oil", or "energy security" (more capitalist distraction). It has everything to do with a capitalist-corporate economic system whose greed and scientific ignorance know no bounds, coupled with a corrupt political system based on hoodwinking and scamming a public whose ignorance and gullibility reach levels of absurdity.

Demand for energy is fueled by an institutionalized system of waste that we call capitalism. The technology has existed for decades to decrease the demand for oil by increasing the fuel efficiency of vehicles. It has not been implemented because it would reduce oil company profits and power.

The Toyota Prius is a car that can get forty to fifty miles per gallon of gas. General Motors comes out with a hybrid SUV that gets two to three MPG more than its gas-guzzling counterpart. It is an overweight, over-engineered, over-priced waste of engineering talent, and GM complains that they can't "compete" with Japanese auto companies. What a crock.

Back in the 1990's, GM developed the EV1 and EV2 electric cars. They were leased in California to meet a mandate for low pollution vehicle development. They were so well-liked by the drivers that most of them wanted to buy them. GM got so scared by this popularity, that they recalled all of the vehicles and destroyed them. This is documented in the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?".

The wikipedia website, http://www.Wikipedia.com has an entry on the EV1:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1

An interesting paragraph highlights the point that I am making here.

(snip)
.......
It has recently been theorized by the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? that the EV1 program was eliminated because it threatened the oil industry and because it required virtually no maintenance and therefore threatened GM's profitability by undermining the replacement parts aftermarket as well as the company's strategy of planned obsolescence. GM responded to the film's claims, before actually having seen the movie, laying out several reasons why the EV1 was not commercially viable at the time.<28>
.......

In other words, the technology was sound, the marketability was there, but the profit motive was paramount in GM's decicion to kill the project. The lesson is obvious: The public cannot depend on the "profit motive" to develop and implement the technology to reduce energy costs. Only government regulation will force the corporations to loosen the stranglehold they have over the economy and the planet.


Development of efficient mass transit, such as light rail, has been stymied, not by technical problems or high cost, but by political machinations and corruption. "Billions for more roads to nowhere, not one dime for mass transit."

The ONLY intelligent and practical way to reduce the cost of energy, reduce pollution, and make life sustainable on this planet is to REDUCE DEMAND for energy. It is doable since the high demand for energy is artificially maintained by the corporations for more profit.

Oil is used to make just about everything made of plastic, and most plastic is used to make goods designed to be used once and thrown away. The big hooplah made about recycling is a farce. Most of the items made of plastic should never be manufactured in the first place. Even goods that are theoretically supposed to be reused, are so poorly made that they are designed not to last.

Many electronics gadgets made in Asian sweatshops are designed to be unrepairable, and the quality is abysmally low. This does not mean that it is low priced. Every Sunday, there are ads in the paper for Hi-Fi stereo systems costing hundreds of dollars. I have seen the stuff and "high fidelity" it ain't. Also, having worked in electronics, the systems I see couldn't have cost more than fifty to seventy five dollars to manufacture, if that much. Yet, these sytems cost three to four hundred dollars or more. Modern marketing can sell packaged manure for profit.

The bottom line to this post is that there is NO economic solution to our problems. The "invisble hand" of Adam Smith cannot work where there is no real economic competition. NAFTA, OPEC, WTO, IMF, World Bank, the Federal Reserve and a whole host of corporate cartel agreements are designed to stifle competition. The only solution is political. The governments of the world have to rein in corporate greed and power.

That will only happen when we get a government that is not overwhelmingly corrupt or intimidated by the wealthy ... On second thought, we are so screwed.

The manure coming from the right wing is that higher oil prices will bring more oil discoveries and magically lower oil prices.

Indonesia's problems and similar problems in the Middle East point out that oil production is not like turning the handle on your water faucet to get more flow.

The right wing talk about getting our "friends" the Saudis to increase oil production and that will solve the problem. The Saudis have been using many destructive techniques to increase oil production, and they are making it more difficult for them to sustain high levels of production. That is one reason costs are going up. They are running out of "cheap", that is, easy-to-pump oil.

biggest oil producers.

The canary in the coalmine?