Sir Richard Branson and fellow leading businessmen will warn ministers this week that the world is running out of oil and faces an oil crunch within five years. The founder of the Virgin group, whose rail, airline and travel companies are sensitive to energy prices, will say that the ­coming crisis could be even more serious than the credit crunch.

"Our message to government and businesses is clear: act," he says in a foreword to a new report on the crisis. "Don't let the oil crunch catch us out in the way that the credit crunch did."

Read more: The Guardian
Additional reading: The Oil Crunch Report by UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security

Kjell Aleklett, President of ASPO International

The title above was borrowed from the Financial Times. Last week the World Economic Forum in Davos celebrated its 40th anniversary and one of the sessions addressed the world’s energy security. The chairperson for the session was Daniel Yergin, the founder of CERA (Cambridge Energy Research Associates). Before his departure to Davos the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) wrote: “All the world loves a bringer of good news, so energy guru Daniel Yergin should by all rights be guaranteed a warm welcome at Davos this week”. The news that he bore with him was that “the awful day of ‘peak oil’, when the world will have depleted its finite hydrocarbon resources to the point where it can never again increase production, is still a long way off”.

A magazine that regularly falls into ASPO’s letterbox is “OPEC Bulletin”. According to their advertising a yearly subscription costs $70, but the fact that it comes to ASPO without a subscription shows that OPEC has prioritized ASPO in its address list. The latest issue, number 9 for 2009, has focused on Angola. But before I address Angola I want to mention a few of the other articles. Like it or not, oil exports from OPEC will be completely decisive for the future of the OECD nations.

When reading the OPEC Bulletin ones sees a different angle of approach than one is used to. The latest issue discusses the OPEC meeting that, (when the issue was published), was yet to be held on 22 December in Luanda. The date of the meeting was chosen so that they could discuss the anticipated decisions on climate change from the conference in Copenhagen. They were also waiting for the weather prognoses for the northern hemisphere since a cold winter would contribute to a higher oil price. Of course, OPEC hopes for cold weather since it means more money in the till.

One article is about OPEC’s new head office in Vienna that is described as “state-of-the-art”.

The US overtook Russia as the world’s largest natural-gas producer last year as operators tapped unconventional resources while demand in Russia plunged amid the country’s worst economic decline on record.

“Minimal hurricane disruptions and significant growth in production from onshore shale basins have contributed to the increase in domestic supply,” the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency said on its Web site last month.

Russia’s annual gas output fell 12% to 582 billion cubic metres compared to last year. Demand for gas in Russia, the world’s largest user of the fuel after the US, contracted last year along with the economy. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said 30 December that annual gross domestic product declined 8.5%, the most since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Industrial output fell about 11.5%, the Russian Economy Ministry said last month.

Read more: Upstream Online

The City of Bloomington in Indiana, USA, first formally recognized that the City must begin preparing for peak oil in July 2006. A Peak Oil Task Force was created. The specific charge of the Task Force is to acquire and study current and credible data; seek community feedback; coordinate efforts with other governmental agencies; work to educate the community; and, to develop a Bloomington Peak Oil Task Force Report for approval by the Mayor and Common Council outlining strategies the City and community might pursue to mitigate the effect of declining fuel supplies in areas including, but not limited to: transportation, municipal services, energy production and consumption, food security, water and wastewater.

In December 2009, the Task Force's report was approved by the Common Council.

Read more and find the report here: http://bloomington.in.gov/peakoil

Kjell Aleklett, President of ASPO International

We stand at the doorway to a new year but also to a new decade and it is time to make a short summary. At the start of the 21st century Peak Oil was not an issue. During the 1990s the oil price fluctuated around $20 per barrel and that the price would increase was unthinkable. The International Energy Agency (IEA), the US Energy Information Agency (EIA), the World Bank and others all had prognoses showing that the price would be around $20 per barrel in 2020.

When in 1998 Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère wrote their now famous article “The End of Cheap Oil” in Scientific American predicting that production of cheap oil would reach a maximum around 2005 there was no one that took them seriously. Instead, in March 1999 The Economist advanced the opinion that the world would be “Drowning in Oil”. Personally I took the warning signals serious and started to learn as much as possible about oil depletion.

Using King Hubbert’s mathematical description of future oil production one could easily calculate that a production maximum would occur within 20 years.

Divisions within OPEC have eased as the dual threat of the global economic crisis and climate change talks force oil producers to be pragmatic and unified, analysts said on Sunday.

But the stance of the price hawks has since lost support, leading to a convergence of positions within the bloc.

"What happened makes you think. An oil price of 75 dollars is higher than they could have hoped for. Even the most hawkish nations are finding it hard to ask for more," said Francis Perrin of the Oil and Gas Journal.

This turnaround came about because producers were afraid of another price collapse, according to Julian Lee, analyst at the Centre For Global Energy Studies in London. Another reason for the appeasement of the hawks was that the countries which traditionally call for high prices have proved less than effective in implementing decisions taken by OPEC.

"When you see in the OPEC bulletins the rising concern linked to climate change, you can see that producers are closing ranks," said Perrin. "In the hardest times in its history, OPEC tends to stick together."

Read more: Rigzone

Colin Campbell, founder of ASPO, has written a comment to the recent article about the IEA whistleblower from the newspaper the Guardian. Dr Campbells comments are available from below:

	Attachment	Size
	Campbell_comments_20091110.pdf	55.88 KB

The world is closer to a peak in oil supply than International Energy Agency estimates admit, UK newspaper The Guardian reported in today’s edition, citing an unidentified "whistleblower" at the IEA.

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

"Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90 million to 95 million barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further," the Guardian quoted the IEA source as saying.

Read more: Upstream Online or The Guardian