Posted By: Jeff BCan't help feeling that this is just the beginning - peak oil here we come!

The forthcoming steady climb of fuel prices (some say tenfold in 10 yrs, so e,g. a hotel paying £30k pa for fuel today will have to find £300k pa by then - many businesses will go under - and a tank of petrol will cost £400) is hardly at all to do with either global warming or peak oil (both deniable), but is about China/India's insatiable demand, which the mainstream can't deny.

Oil reserves are finite so surely the insatiable demands of India and China are by definition simply going to cause peak oil to peak even earlier? (assuming they can continue to afford to buy the stuff of course). But I agree with you that some countries economies are going to go to the wall perhaps before then unless someone comes up with some renewable energy alternatives!

Posted By: Jeff BOil reserves are finite so surely the insatiable demands of India and China are by definition simply going to cause peak oil to peak even earlier?

No - as their demand drives prices up, so existing oil reserves that are presently uneconomic to exploit, become economic. Rising prices may also slow down demand - it's hard to guess. So rising prices postpone peak oil - perhaps much longer than we've been assuming. Basically, all the oil there is is going to be extracted and used (mostly burnt), sooner or later - unless governments decide to stop using it. Neither peak oil nor rising demand/prices will make that decision for us.

Whose imagination, Nicky? The Caspian is the last of the big oil provinces and will not be sufficient to make up for the decline in the other important areas - Alsaka, North Sea, Cantarell and Ghawar. Conventional crude peaked in May 2005 with present total liquids boosted by biofuels. We're on the plateau now and though there might just possibly be a slight production increase in the next year or two as some new projects come on stream it's then just a question of how steep the depletion curve turns out. The fact that production costs are around $20 while the price is around £100 shows that demand is not being met by increased production but the balance is maintained by high price demand destruction. With such a gap between cost and price there is every insentive to increase the rate of production but it just can't be done. The easy oil is gone and the hard stuff takes a lot of effort to suck out slowly. We are now at the mercy of geology, not Saudi princes. We don't feel it so much in the rich countries as they do in Africa. In Senegal they just close the powerstations when the oil bill can't be paid.

Fuel cells are just a way of storing and transporting energy - they are not a primary fuel.

I would recommend anyone feeling complacent about oil supplies and believing that high prices are some kind of conspiracy between OPEC and Exxon, to have a listen to Matt Simmons:-

http://www.financialsense.com/Experts/2007/Simmons.html

He knows a thing or two about the oil business.