Our story begins with "Peak Oil" - the belief that conventional production of crude has already peaked, and has already slipped into an irreversible decline. As "Peak Oil" moves from mere theory to indisputable fact, the global economy will face wrenching changes. But the vigilant investor will gain an opportunity to profit along the way.

As I discussed in yesterday's edition of The Daily Reckoning, oil production seems all-but-certain to decline, despite the huge new discoveries off the coasts of Brazil, Africa and elsewhere. In fact, production is already declining rapidly from some of the world's largest fields. Mexico's "Catarell" Field, like a kind of Peak Oil poster child, was producing more than 2 million barrels a day as recently as 2005. But production from this field is plummeting irreversibly toward 500,000 barrels a day, as the chart below illustrates.

The recent discoveries of deep offshore oil will certainly help slow the decline of conventional crude oil production, but theses discoveries will not come on line for many, many years.

But what about alternative energy sources? Won't they make up for the shortfall of crude oil? No chance. Alternative energies might offset a tiny sliver of falling crude oil production. But solar panels can't lift a fully loaded Boeing 777 off a runway...nor even lift an empty Piper Cub.

So what about the many sources of "unconventional" oil and gas? Won't these compensate for declining production from conventional sources? The short answer is no.

Geologist Art Berman, for example, offers a decidedly negative view of the latest "big thing" - obtaining large volumes of natural gas from "tight shales." In a comprehensive review of production and flow rates from several thousand wells drilled in the past decade in the Barnett Shale of Texas, Mr. Berman presents a gloomy forecast.

Looking at a large sampling of Barnett wells, the overall data reveal that initial gas flows decline rapidly. With some wells, the drop-off is as much as 70% in the first year, with further declines of 20% in the second year.

This hardly dovetails with the happy talk about how "shale gas" will supply US energy requirements for the next several decades, if not a couple of centuries. It appears that most Barnett wells are short-term money losers, with a few prolific wells carrying the bulk of capital expenditure.

According to Mr. Berman, the picture is not much better in other shale plays, such as the Fayetteville and Haynesville shales. And similar gloomy data are just now starting to come in on the embryonic gas play in the giant Marcellus formation of Pennsylvania.

But this bad news does need to be ALL bad. As the world's mature and aging oil fields slip into an irreversible decline, production from the world's new offshore discoveries will become increasingly important.

Therefore, forward-looking investors can begin TODAY to make selective investments in those sectors of the oil industry that will flourish during the coming oil shock. I am particularly fond of the "deepwater" sector...and have been urging my subscribers for several months to focus on the companies that facilitate deepwater oil production.

Marcio Mello, the former "explorationist" from Petrobras (PBR: NYSE) and now independent petroleum consultant, electrified the Denver meeting of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO) with his analysis of several high-profile deepwater discoveries.

In a riveting talk that lasted well over an hour, Marcio detailed the immense petroleum potential of offshore Brazil, as well as the Amazon Basin. If Marcio's estimates are correct, Brazil may be the location of nearly 200 billion barrels of additional petroleum resources. That's well within the range of current resource estimates for Saudi Arabia.

For good measure, Marcio described the petroleum potential of offshore West Africa - another 130 billion barrels - as well as the Congo region, with 50 billion barrels or more.

Finally, Marcio described the "unknown potential of the US back yard, the Gulf of Mexico (GOM)." Marcio offered remarkable insight into the deep regions of the GOM, 100 miles and more offshore Texas and Louisiana. He showed early work he performed on a number of GOM areas, including the site of BP's (BP: NYSE) recent billion-plus barrel find at the Tiber site.

If his analyses of the South American, African and GOM petroleum systems are correct, the world has access to much more conventional oil than people previously believed. But accessing and producing this oil will require a trillion-dollar level of offshore, deepwater investment. It's a 30- to 50-year project.

"Deepwater" will be a BIG business.

Some of the companies that are well-positioned for the deepwater era of crude oil production include Petrobras, Repsol (REP: NYSE), BP (BP: NYSE) and StatoilHydro (STO: NYSE). I am also a fan of subsea equipment builders like Cameron Intl. (CAM: NYSE) and FMC Technologies (FTI: NYSE), plus service companies like Halliburton (HAL: NYSE) and Baker Hughes (BHI: NYSE).

These are a few of my favorite long-term plays for the long-term era of deep-water development.

Regards,

Byron King,
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Peak Oil – The Risks
• Supply of Conventional Crude Oil is Very Close to its Peak
• Peak Oil: Supply Data Doesn’t Lie
• Where Will Future Oil Production Come From and How Can Investors Profit Today? Part 2
• Pemex and Mexican Peak Oil Equal Expensive Oil

That's the world's current production of crude oil...and that may very well be close to the world's PEAK production of crude oil. Although the recession caused a temporary decrease in consumption, demand is already bouncing back toward pre-crisis levels. Too bad production isn't.

"Can't we get more than 85 million barrels?" some folks are bound to wonder. Let's look into that...

A couple weeks ago, I attended the 2009 international conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO), out in Denver. Here's the long and short of it. We're in trouble. With a capital "T," and that rhymes with "P," and that stands for Peak Oil. By every measure, the world's output of crude oil peaked between 2005 and 2007.

Yes, the worldwide total output of what we generically call "oil" has risen - slightly - in recent years. But that's because there are increasing volumes of natural gas liquids (NGLs) in the mix, plus unconventional oil like what the global marketplace obtains from Canada's oil sands. But the production of oil - actual oil - has peaked already. The future of conventional petroleum output is downhill, even with the future output from the deep-water offshore discoveries.

"There's no such thing as West Texas Intermediate [WTI] oil anymore," Peak Oil apologist, Matt Simmons, moaned to the ASPO conference attendees. Instead, the pipeline crossroads like Cushing, Okla., have become little more than "crude oil pharmacies."

In other words, as the quality of the crude from the traditional U.S. oil patch continues to degrade, oilmen must mix and match their product with "sweeter" forms of crude if they hope to sell it as the premium- priced WTI. Thus, operators at Cushing take whatever oil they can obtain from one place, plus whatever oil they can obtain from another place. They mix and match, and blend it all with synthetic crude from Canada. Maybe they add some imported oil juice and then send it down the line as WTI.

Along these same lines, Venezuelan economist Carlos Rossi stated to ASPO his analysis of oil trends in the U.S. "You are worried about your foreign oil imports now," he said. "You in the U.S. import about 65% of your oil today. You don't like it. But if you follow the clear trends, by 2025, you'll be importing about 92% of your oil. You'll like that even less." No doubt.

The market meltdown and world recession of the past year has bought some time. But the planet is still staring at an energy problem that's coming down the tracks like a runaway freight train.

Sure, there's a lot more oil "out there"...as in WAY out there - 150 miles offshore, beneath 8,000 feet of water and 20,000 feet of rock and salt. Yes, that offshore resource is out there, but it's super hard to extract.

And so what? Aren't the world's oil companies busy developing these massive offshore deposits? Yes, but this development will take decades. It'll take time and capital and expensive cutting-edge technologies, some of which are barely commercially viable.

Future energy supplies have never been more uncertain, according to Simmons. It's difficult to say with specificity how bad things are, he says, because the data are so poor on a worldwide basis.

"Look at what happened with the bad information we had, or didn't have, with the financial institutions over the past couple of years," Simmons said at the recent ASPO Conference. "With our energy data, it's worse. We're in for some shocks that will change our lives in ways that'll rival Pearl Harbor."

Things could go wrong with energy supplies in any of a dozen places, according to Mr. Simmons. In Venezuela, the output of the state oil company PdVSA is declining at alarming rates due to political interference and underinvestment. In Nigeria, the low-grade civil war could quickly morph into a large-scale civil war. In Iraq, according to Mr. Simmons, "They're in the dark about how to rebuild their oil industry."

Closer to home, Simmons expects net oil exports from Mexico to vanish within 24 months or less. This event will play havoc with U.S. refiners on the Gulf Coast. Mexico has simply delayed for too long its effort to explore, drill and rebuild its fast-depleting oil resources. Mexico is going to have to scramble to salvage something from its looming energy disaster.

But even without a supply shock, Simmons believes that the mere inevitability of declining production will cause oil to hit $200 a barrel by the end of next year. Longer term, Mr. Simmons expects to see oil at $500-700 per barrel. "People need to understand how expensive it is to obtain oil," said Simmons.

Much of the world's energy infrastructure is old and rusting and will require several trillions of dollars to replace - if it can be replaced. Furthermore, new technology is coming on line slower than most people anticipate. The deeper, more challenging environments are sucking down technology and money, and yielding less than expected in many cases. According to one study, only eight out of 100 major energy projects came in on time, were within budget and yielded the expected volumes of oil and natural gas.

The stark fact is that oil is going to get a lot more expensive and the bull market in oil will be firmly in place for a long time. Smart investors would take advantage of any corrections or dips to get themselves buckled-in for the ride.

Regards,

Byron King,
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Peak Oil – The Rewards
• Crude Oil Becoming Much Harder to Find
• Peak Oil: Supply Data Doesn’t Lie
• Pemex and Mexican Peak Oil Equal Expensive Oil
• Supply of Conventional Crude Oil is Very Close to its Peak

Look. Skeptics can say what they want; it does not change the fact that our world is struggling to maintain daily flow-rates. Whether you agree with us or not, the energy reality is that the supply of conventional crude oil is very close to its peak and no other fuel source can easily fill the supply gap.

Yes, various governments are now promoting alternative sources of energy and over the following years, we expect this drive to intensify. But those sources will provide too little, too late. So there remains, today, an unbelievable degree of denial when it comes to 'Peak Oil.' Most people simply dismiss it as a conspiracy. Others gleefully point to alternative sources of energy, whereas some believe that the vast improvements in oil drilling technology will save the day. Do not be seduced by these delusional hopes.

Remember, crude oil is the lifeblood of the global economy and roughly 70% of it is used to power transportation. Moreover, a vast amount of crude oil is also used up by agriculture (production of fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation systems). In fact, modern-day agriculture can be best described as a process of converting hydrocarbons into calories. Without cheap energy, the world would certainly have trouble producing half of the current food supply and the result could be far worse.

Thus, crude oil is a key ingredient in two of the most critical processes which make modern life possible - transportation and agriculture. And shortages of this vital natural resource will result in extreme pain. In the initial stages, the price of crude oil will rise remorselessly and eventually, we will face rationing.

Now that we have established the importance of crude oil, we will explain why new drilling technology and alternative sources of energy will not make this problem go away.

First, as far as drilling technology is concerned, it is worth noting that America is home to the best oilfield technology on this planet. However, its oil production peaked in the early 1970s and has been in a relentless decline. Furthermore, apart from America, other technologically advanced nations in the world have also failed in maintaining their daily flow-rates. For instance, after exporting crude oil for over two decades, Britain is now a net importer and its production is in a state of permanent decline. Hard data confirms that two of the most advanced countries in the world now live in a post 'Peak Oil' era, so what are the odds that other less fortunate nations will succeed in averting 'Peak Oil'?

Secondly, as far as alternative sources of energy are concerned, they represent a drop in the energy ocean and will not be able to offset the depletion in crude oil. Despite all the euphoria surrounding renewable energy, the 'sources' like ethanol and solar panels are net energy losers. In other words, it takes more energy to produce ethanol and solar panels than the energy you obtain from them. For sure, hybrid and electric cars will help us to some degree but you must keep in mind the fact that electricity is not a source of energy; it is a carrier of energy. Even if electric cars become popular, how will we generate sufficient electricity?

Elsewhere in the alternative energy patch, a lot of hopes currently rest on unconventional sources of oil (especially tar sands and shale oil). Once again, this optimism is misplaced, as the increased supply from the unconventional sources will not even make a dent in the overall energy picture. The nearby chart confirms that our world currently produces roughly 85 million barrels per day of total liquids and out of this gigantic sum, only 13 million barrels per day of oil is derived from unconventional sources. So, when the production of conventional crude oil finally declines due to 'Peak Oil', it is extremely improbable that unconventional supply will be able to rise to the challenge.

As far as Canada's tar sands are concerned, Alberta currently produces roughly 1.4 million barrels of oil per day and under the best case scenario, this figure is expected to rise to just 3.5 million barrels per day by 2020. To complicate matters even further, the tar sands require huge amounts of water and natural gas. In addition to this, the mining procedure is extremely polluting. For example, the process of extracting 'oil' from bitumen releases at least three times the amount of carbon dioxide emissions as regular oil production. Accordingly, we have no doubt in our minds that Canada's tar is not the Holy Grail.

Finally, the new oil shale discoveries in America are not going to help us either because the 'oil' trapped in the shale is in fact kerogen - a precursor to oil. So far, all major oil companies have struggled to convert the kerogen into usable oil and it will be interesting to see whether any of them succeeds in the future. In any case, this conversion process is extremely expensive and we can assure you that shale will not be producing any oil at today's prices. Recent studies reveal that the price of oil will have to rise to several hundred dollars per barrel to make this process economically feasible.

Well, now that we have covered the supply side, let us briefly discuss the demand side of the equation. According to the IEA, global oil usage in 2009 will amount to 84.4 million barrels per day and it will rise to 85.7 million barrels per day in 2010. This means that oil demand will rise by 1.5% over the next twelve months which is in line with the growth rate over the past two decades. If this growth rate continues over the next 4-5 years, there is no way our world will be able to ramp up production.

Unfortunately, positive thoughts and wishful thinking will not change the equation. Precious time has been wasted and we have no margin of safety. We must prepare ourselves for sky-high commodity prices and periods of acute shortages, which will make wartime conditions seem rosy. In fact, we believe we are already a decade into this painful transition but let us warn you that we have seen nothing yet.

If our assessment is correct, it seems prudent to make a sizeable allocation to the energy sector. However, given the realities of 'Peak Oil', we do not recommend exposure to the oil majors, as their reserves and production are in decline. On the contrary, we urge you to invest your capital in quality upstream oil/gas companies and businesses involved in the energy services sector.

Regards,

Puru Saxena,
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Peak Oil – The Rewards
• Peak Oil: Supply Data Doesn’t Lie
• Increased Oil Production Won’t Solve the Energy Crisis
• Peak Oil – The Risks
• We Are Facing a Global Oil Crunch

The team at Casey's Energy Opportunities believe that planned government buying or selling of crude oil for SPRs actually have very little impact in the overall market. However, an overall drawdown of worldwide inventory could put downward pressure on the price of oil. The various countries also have their particular reasons and influences in decisions to tap their reserves.

So which countries are executing preparedness plans to fill their strategic reserves with $70 oil now (as opposed to $140+)? Below are the 10 countries that consume the most oil in the world, as of 2008, the latest figures available from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy:

Russia, Canada, and Saudi Arabia can leave the list, as they are net exporters of oil and thus do not actually require a strategic reserve, at least in the short term. We'll also bump Brazil, because its balance of imports is dwindling every year, and it should become a exporter before it requires a reserve. That leaves six countries to examine:

The United States

Not surprisingly, America has the largest strategic reserve in the world in an absolute sense. Its 727 million barrels are stored in four hollowed-out salt domes (and one pending) along the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. These add up to some 62 days' worth of imports, according to government sources. The United States government currently has plans to push this to 1 billion barrels, or about 85 days' worth of imports, which would make the reserves equivalent to those of Japan and Korea.

The SPR build-up will be accomplished by expanding two of the current facilities, for an additional 113 million barrels, and (probably) building a new one in Richton, Missouri, for 160 million barrels. The Richton project has met local opposition, because it would require pumping 50 million gallons of freshwater per day from the Pascagoula River to dissolve enough salt to open up another subterranean cavern. The total cost of the program is estimated at US$3.7 billion, not including the cost to fill the reserves. Oil purchases are likely to be slow, at around 100,000 bpd (barrels per day) before 2014 and 150,000 bpd thereafter.

In a real emergency, the combined American strategic and commercial reserves (the latter held by private corporations, especially refiners) may seem unnervingly thin from the perspective of energy security. Add to that the fact that the government can release them at a rate of only 4.4 million barrels per day, or about half its imports.

Still, the 108 or so days' reserve it has between government and commercial sources are considered adequate by international standards. The United States has used this reserve twice in the past 20 years (Desert Storm and Hurricane Katrina) to combat severe demand or supply disruptions. It also has the luxury of importing more oil from Canada in an emergency.

Scenarios that could force a sustained drawdown of reserves:

• Sustained hyperinflation in the United States due to actions by the Federal Reserve that causes oil-producing countries to look for better markets to sell oil.
• A prolonged general embargo by OPEC on the United States, forcing America to look to traditional partners such as Canada and Mexico, though they might not have sufficient oil.
• Another war, potentially in North Korea or Iran, requiring a large amount of oil input from America that it simply does not have.
• A particularly active hurricane season that knocks out a large amount of production capacity in the Gulf of Mexico, and the United States releases from the SPR to help.

China

China's strategic reserves began being built in 2004, when leaders in China began to realize that the country had no adequate government- controlled reserves to combat any disruptions in the supply of oil. China is a large importer and is dependent on the same sources of foreign oil as the United States. China is even more anxious to build such a reserve, as two of its neighbors, Korea and Japan, both have large strategic reserves.

China currently has four government reserves with a total reserve potential of 272 million barrels, which translates to about 30 days' consumption. Two of the four have been confirmed full, and there are rumors that all four are and that China has taken advantage of the recent precipitous drop in the price of oil to buy up. According to Chinese government sources, however, the reserves are likely not to be completely full until 2010, and 2009 buying of oil will be at around 42 million barrels.

The government has also announced plans to increase the country's reserve from 30 to 100 days of consumption. The next stage of the development will call for an additional 170 million barrels in eight storage facilities. The locations of the facilities are as yet secret.

In an emergency, China would likely turn to Russia to buy oil, though only the naive would be surprised if Russia added a premium for the privilege.

Scenarios that could force a sustained drawdown of reserves in China:

• Worldwide embargo on China due to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
• High oil prices force Chinese industries out of business, pressuring the government to keep oil prices low domestically by selling some of the reserves to domestic companies.
• North Korea asks for oil from China to support military action on the Korean Peninsula, and China ships it to them on the black market.
• Russia slows or stops its exports as part of the Russian "dominance via energy" strategy, leaving Chinese pipelines trickling and Chinese industries disrupted.

Japan/South Korea

We have placed Japan and South Korea's reserves together, as the two countries have a treaty that allows them to share their strategic reserves.

Resource-poor Japan has one of the world's largest strategic oil reserves, enough for 82 days of imports. State-controlled reserves are run by the state-owned Japan Oil, Gas, and Metals National Corporation. The reserves consist of 320 million barrels in 10 different locations, which makes them second only to the United States in absolute volume. Japan's island geography means that having an emergency supply of crude oil is crucial, and the Japanese government obviously has not ignored this aspect.

South Korea is in one of the global "hotspots" in the world, right beside North Korea. As the country is under an almost constant threat of war, the government has stocked up some 76 million barrels, with capacity for an additional 40 million barrels.

Scenarios that could force a drawdown of reserves:

• Just one at this time, from two possible sources: political instability in the region caused by either the Taiwan or the Korea conundrums disrupts tanker transport, perhaps even forces them to port.

India

India has a small reserve it began to build in 2004. This stockpile is sufficient for perhaps only two weeks of consumption. The country eventually wants to raise this level to 45 days, though the first phase has not even been completed yet. The projects are estimated to come online in 2012, which means it has taken eight years from planning to completion. These figures imply that India will not even have a somewhat sufficient strategic reserve until 2016, given that the expansion project was approved in 2008.

Germany

Germany has the largest reserve in Europe and is among the top in the world as well. Its government has satisfied a federal law that regulates storage be at least 90 days' worth of net imports. More than half of the storage is in Southern Germany, where large salt caverns exist. Germany is well prepared in its strategic oil reserves, and there are no glaring factors that would force a drawdown of reserves, barring a global catastrophe. Furthermore, the reserves of Germany, France, and Italy are pooled and can be used by any of the three countries in an emergency.

So How Much Do the Reserves Matter?

According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates, some 2 billion barrels are held in government-owned strategic reserves around the world. Though this seems like plenty of oil, does it really impact the spot price of oil? Collectively, the answer is yes, as this volume corresponds to 23 days' worth of global consumption. If drawn down together over a short period of time, the effect on spot price could be substantial.

For illustration's sake, suppose that countries collectively draw down their entire reserves over the period of a year. This rate would make up for 10% of the daily worldwide trade of crude oil, which could certainly impact price (imagine ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil both going under at the same time).

Individually, however, even China and the United States have a limited impact on the spot price of oil over a single year. If the United States' inventory were drawn over an entire year, it would only make for a 4% increase in supply. Under normal buying patterns of each country's strategic reserves, the impact is even smaller. Since China's 42-million-barrel purchase is over one year, their purchase would not even make a dent in the daily trade of oil.

Thus, a concerted effort by the worldwide reserves can definitely keep prices down in the short term (within a year, two at best), but cannot make for a paradigm shift in the supply/demand model of oil or the Peak Oil argument. And from the buying side, if governments plan the filling of their strategic reserves, the impact on the spot price of oil is likely to be minimal.

Perception is a tricky horse to ride, however, as we all know. Given a worldwide panic for oil à la the 1973 oil embargo, oil prices could spike in the short term, because government reserves would likely raise purchases 10% or so in a real emergency. This effect would be short lived for the foreseeable future, though, as worldwide reserves are already reaching their limits.

In short, if everything goes according to "plan" by the governments, even filling a large reserve such as the Chinese SPR would have little impact on the price of oil. For SPRs to truly impact the spot price of oil, it would have to be a global situation, with war and embargo the two most likely scenarios. Even then, the impact would be mellowed by limitations on how quickly governments can either release or purchase the oil.

Regards,

Marin Katusa
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• How to Buy Crude Oil for US$2 a Barrel
• The War for Oil Reserves
• OPEC Agrees Not to Cut Oil Production Until it Meets in May
• Oil Prices Has The Mogambo Guru Sticking His Thumb in His Eye
• Pemex and Mexican Peak Oil Equal Expensive Oil

But let's start with sovereign wealth fund of China, the China Investment Corporation (CIC). CIC was set up in 2007 with US$200 billion of China's nearly $2 trillion foreign exchange reserves. It's been shopping ever since, with mixed results. Last year, for example, CIC stood pat and only invested US$4.8 billion outside China. It preferred to ride the bubble in Chinese bank stocks, which worked out pretty well for it.

Yesterday, however, Reuters reports that CIC is now cashed up to the tune of $300 billion and ready to buy again. "It will not be too bad this year," says CIC chairman Lou Jinwei. And here's the good part. "Both China and America are addressing bubbles and we're just taking advantage of that. So we can't lose...We have to be in everything because you never know what's going to happen in this world."

Come again?

There's a charitable way of reading these comments and there's a straight forward way. The charitable way is that Lou and the rest of China's economic mangers know that their $2 trillion in forex reserves (which are mostly in U.S. dollars) are in perpetual danger of devaluation. If you had a pocket full of $300 billion in monopoly money, trading it for anything-anything at all-would be the sensible strategy.

You'd want to trade it for a real tangible assets or equity before asset sellers started treating your money with disdain. This is why CIC "can't lose." Better to trade it for something now then watch it turn into nothing later.

The straightforward interpretation is that the Chinese wealth fund managers have lost their marbles. Counting on more bubbles to increase your wealth is a portfolio destruction strategy. Chinese fund managers may end up being every bit as stupid as the hedge fund managers and bankers and CEOs at U.S. banks who ran their respective institutions into the ground making the worst leveraged bet of the century on U.S. housing.

The only real difference, as far as we can see, is that the U.S. bets were made with borrowed money (often borrowed from Chinese creditors, we reckon), whereas China is investing the fruits of its productive labour over the last twenty years. It is a massive gamble. The U.S. managers, who may have been criminal rather than stupid, did tremendous damage to their country's economy. Will China's managers replicate the feat?

This also makes you wonder how much the emergence of China itself is a function of a global bubble in fiat money since August of 1971, when Richard Nixon took the U.S. dollar off the gold standard. Sure, there are tens of millions of Chinese people working in real factories making real products out of real raw materials (many sourced in Australia). These people have real dreams, ambitions, and economic aspirations, not to mention real savings (in gold and paper money).

But is it possible that China's time at the centre of the global economic stage is limited because China's economic model itself always depended on cheap credit and fiat money? Yes, yes. It goes against the whole "next economic empire" way of thinking. But if China's official asset managers are counting on bubbles to make them wealthier, you wonder how sound the model is, and how long the wealth will last. We wonder anyway, which is our main job at the DR.

Empires. They sure don't make them like they used to. Rome lasted a good long while, with a big lead up as Republic. The 1,000 year Reich didn't last ten years. The economic and political clock seems to be speeding up these days.

That would be something. A twenty-year global boom from fiat money that simply accelerated the depletion of natural resources and the misallocation of capital to projects that are uneconomic at lower levels of household and business debt. Hmmn.

Speaking of resources, two notes that prove oil is still out there, but getting harder to find and more expensive to produce. PetroChina will spend $2 billion to buy a 60% stake in the MacKay River and Dover oil sands projects in Canada's Athabasca oil sands. Canadian sources reckon there are 5 billion barrels of bitumen on the properties. But turning bitumen into oil isn't easy or cheap. It takes lots of water and energy, neither of which are money.

The other note is that BP says it has found as much as three billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. It found it by drilling 10,685 metres below the Gulf of Mexico, or 35,000 feet. So BP drilled the equivalent of a Mt. Everest underwater to find the oil. Actually, Mt. Everest plus another six thousand feet.

This is ample evidence of Peak Oil. It shows that oil is getting harder to find and more expensive to produce. Technology has improved, of course, allowing exploration companies to look further afield than ever before. Oil companies can increase reserves this way. They're finding oil. But it is not the cheap, easy, free-flowing stuff once found in the oil fields of East Texas or Saudi Arabia.

By the way, if you're wondering what could cause a second dip in the global recession, we have an answer: government stimulus. Yesterday was full of stories on how the stimulus spending by the Australian federal government made the recession less worse than it might have been and produced positive GDP growth. This has everything backwards, although it's being swallowed whole by the financial press.

A rebound based on monetary inflation and government spending isn't a real rebound at all. It gives the appearance of normalcy and economic health through rising asset values and more transactions in the economy (which GDP itself measures). But unless there's a big pick up in private investment, the economy is not on any sounder long-term footing.

In fact, it's worse. The illusion of prosperity created by stimulus spending induces people into maintaining debt loads they might otherwise reduce. Consumption patterns which ought to change in order to put the household and corporate balance sheets back in working order aren't changed at all. And when the government stimulus is withdrawn later---as it must be before higher fiscal deficits lead to rising interest rates-the economy reverts back to its pre-stimulus levels of growth-only without the underlying issues of over consumption and too much debt having been addressed.

Or the short version: there is no easy way out of this mess. The government can't create wealth by borrowing money or taxing people and spread the lucre around to favoured groups at the expense of others. That's theft and it's immoral. But the real issue is that the whole economy needs to reduce leverage. The housing bubble has to pop. And the nation has to quit living above its means (we remember writing this about America five years ago).

How about some reader mail?

Hi Dan,

Gene A.

Not this first time we've heard this and won't be the last. We write about outliers and Black Swans. Those topics are controversial, which is why the mainstream media is afraid to express a real idea about them. What's more, getting people's attention in this economy is tough. Sorry you don't like the ads. But don't expect them to change.

For one, we have to pay the bills. As much as we like writing the DR, there's an entire publishing operation to support that provides research to paying subscribers. Secondly, we wouldn't describe any of our publications as "loopy get-rich quick schemes." We know how much time and research goes into each monthly report. We stand behind all the ads and have a hand in a fair a few of them to make sure they're telling the stories we think you can profit from. If you really don't like them, you can always just ignore them.

--Hi Dan

Aidan

--DR

John

Dan Denning
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• The Iron Ore Pricing War Between China & Australia
• China, the Miracle Economy
• Inflation: Enemy Number Two
• How Did Australia Get Caught Up Losing Money in Commercial U.S. Real Estate?
• India Beats China to Walk Away With 200 Tonnes of IMF Gold

According to the US Department of Energy, liquid fuel demand in the developed nations peaked in August 2005 at 41.89 million barrels per day. Since then, it has plunged by 3.6 million barrels per day to 38.27 million barrels per day. However, you may want to note that despite these tough economic conditions, consumption has been extremely resilient in the emerging world. For instance, demand in the developing countries peaked in October 2008 at 46.33 million barrels per day and it is down by only 0.36 million barrels per day! I am amazed that the worst global recession in decades has barely managed to shrink energy demand in the developing world. Whilst this is wonderful news for the energy investor, it is a terrible sign for society.

At present, our world is using up roughly 84 million barrels of liquid fuels per day and for the moment at least, there is sufficient supply to meet demand (Figure 1). However, when economic activity picks up, it won't take much for demand to zip right past supply. Remember, it is much easier to increase usage, but it takes a long time to ramp up production. So, unless this is a permanent global recession (which I doubt), it is inevitable that the price of oil will go up significantly over the medium to long-term.

On the supply side of the equation, let me be clear. If I was asked to pick the biggest threat to a sustainable economic recovery, Peak Oil would top that list. Remember, Peak Oil doesn't mean that we are running out of oil reserves, crude will be around for decades. However, 'Peak Oil' does imply that we are dangerously close to peak global oil production. 'Peak Oil' also means that rather than experiencing a burst in oil supplies as many expect, from here onwards, we will witness sharp declines in global flow rates. In a nutshell, the era of cheap energy is over and the price of crude oil will rocket higher over the
coming decade.

Now, many skeptics will argue that if Peak Oil was real, the price of oil wouldn't have dropped to roughly US$30 per barrel in last autumn's stunning crash. Valid point; but let us not forget that the spectacular plunge occurred at a time when global economic activity virtually came to a standstill. Let us also keep in mind that last autumn's crash in asset prices was caused by a total freeze in credit and the associated asset liquidation. Whilst I agree that the final action in crude oil's parabolic blow-off last July smacked of speculation, I can assure you that speculation alone couldn't have created a multi-year boom whereby the price of crude oil went up by almost 1500%! As you can see from Figure 1 above, supply clearly fell short of demand between 2005 and 2008, and this is why we had a magnificent bull-market in crude oil.

Make no mistake, global demand for liquid fuels will rise again - and if my homework is correct, supply won't be able to keep up. If you ignore the noise and review hard data, you will observe that the vast majority of the world's most prolific oil provinces are now past peak production and in a state of permanent depletion. According to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, out of the 54 oil producing nations and regions in the world, only 14 are still increasing production. Alarmingly, 30 oil producing nations and regions are definitely past their peak output and the remaining 10 appear to have modestly declining production rates. Put another way, when weighted by production, Peak Oil is already a grim reality in 61% of the oil producing world!

Still not convinced about Peak Oil? Then review Figure 2, which charts the expected combined flow rates for crude oil, lease condensates and Canadian Oil Sands. As you can see from the grey shaded area, production is about to decline by roughly 5 million barrels per day by 2012.

Ironically, Figure 2 also plots the optimistic (almost laughable) forecast made by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its "World Energy Outlook 2008". Interestingly, in last year's "World Energy Outlook", the IEA stated that in order to fulfill its optimistic projections, the world had to install 64 million barrels per day of new supply by 2030 or the equivalent of six times the Saudi Arabian output! Furthermore, the IEA declared that the energy industry had to invest hundreds of billions of dollars every year to achieve this favorable outcome.

Now, I can understand that the IEA is a government-funded agency so it has to paint a rosy picture, but it is ominous that the energy watchdog failed to mention where this surplus oil would come from!

Well, I guess you get the idea. Global crude oil production has probably peaked, new discoveries have dried up and there is a shortage of capital for investment purposes. Apart from these factors, if you believe the energy optimists, all is well in the energy industry and the price of oil is about to drop to zero!

After years of extensive research, I have no doubt in my mind that unless global demand stays weak forever, we will see supply shortages in the not too distant future. And before that occurs, the price of crude oil will stage an explosive rally. Accordingly, I suggest that all my readers allocate a large proportion of their investment portfolio to upstream energy companies and to businesses in the energy services sector.

Finally, in the energy complex, the price of natural gas is still scraping along its recent crash low and this is a fantastic long-term investment opportunity. As we approach winter in the Northern Hemisphere and heating demand picks up, we are likely to see a big rally in the price of natural gas. So, investors may want to allocate capital to this unbelievably inexpensive commodity.

Regards,

Puru Saxena
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Supply of Conventional Crude Oil is Very Close to its Peak
• Pemex and Mexican Peak Oil Equal Expensive Oil
• Peak Oil – The Rewards
• Peak Oil – The Risks
• OPEC Agrees Not to Cut Oil Production Until it Meets in May

Last time Iran had a revolution, in 1979, it ushered in turmoil in the oil (and gold) markets for several years. Of course, the invasion by Iraq in 1980, and subsequent war, had something to do with it as well.

After 30 years, the Iranian theocracy - and well-connected family and friends - has pretty much taken over that nation's economy. Most everything that's worth owning - oil facilities, banks, industrial facilities, etc. - has some 'revolutionary' connection. And these folks are not going to walk away from it without a fight.

There are clearly a series of major disconnects within Iranian society. Young versus old, middle-class versus theocrat, reformer versus revolutionary. And then there's the oil problem. Mr. Depletion and Ms. Rust.

Iran is suffering from its own version of Peak Oil. Iranian net exports of oil are falling. Iran's oil infrastructure is aging. According to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the trend is that Iran will be exporting ZERO oil by 2014, which is a mere five years from now. That means almost no serious money will be coming in for the Iranian leadership and government.

So if you think that they're rioting in the streets of Iran now, just wait awhile. Iran is headed for national insolvency and penury. It'll get even more exciting. Then again, the Iranians may have nuclear weapons. Pretty depressing, huh? Better buy that gold while you can.

Byron King
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

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The Peak Oil story was never about running out of oil. It was about the collapse of complex systems in a world economy faced by the prospect of no further oil-fueled growth. It was something of a shock to many that the first complex system to fail would be banking, but the process is obvious: no more growth means no more ability to pay interest on credit... end of story, as Tony Soprano used to say.

There was a popular theory among Peak Oilers the last decade that the world would enter a "bumpy plateau" period when the global economy would get beaten down by Peak Oil, would then revive as "demand destruction" drove down oil prices, and would be beaten down again as oil prices shot up in response - with serial repetitions of the cycle, each beat-down taking economies lower - the only imaginable outcome being some sort of quiet homeostasis. This scenario did not play out as expected. It was predicated on a mistaken assumption that all systems would retain some kind of operational resilience while ratcheting down. Anyway, the banking system was mortally wounded in the first go-round and the behemoth is dying hard.

The last desperate act of the banking system in the face of Peak Oil's no-more-growth equation was to engineer species of tradable securities that could produce wealth out of thin air rather than productive activity. This was the alphabet soup of algorithm-derived frauds with vague and confounding names such as credit default swaps (CDSs), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), structured investment vehicles (SIVs), and, of course, the basic filler, mortgage backed securities. The banking system is now choking to death on these delicacies.

The trouble is that the EMT squad brought in to rescue the banking system - that is, governments - can't remove these obstructions from the patient's craw. They don't want to drown in a mighty upchuck of the alphabet soup.

The collapse of complex systems is actually predicated on the idea that the systems would mutually reinforce each other's failures. This is now plain to see as the collapse of banking (that is, of both lending and debt service), has led to the collapse of commerce and manufacturing. The next systems to go will probably be farming, transportation, and the oil markets themselves (which constitute the system for allocating and distributing world energy resources). As these things seize up, the final system to go will be governance, at least at the highest levels.

If we're really lucky, human affairs will eventually reorganize at a lower scale of activity, governance, civility, and economy. Every week, the failure to recognize the nature of our predicament thrusts us further into the uncharted territory of hardship. The task of government right now is not to prop up doomed systems at their current scales of failure, but to prepare the public to rebuild our systems at smaller scales.

The net effect of the failures in banking is that a lot of people have less money than they expected they would have a year ago. This is bad enough, given our habits and practices of modern life. But what happens when farming collapses? The prospect for that is closer than most of us might realize. The way we produce our food has been organized at a scale that has ruinous consequences, not least its addiction to capital. Now that banking is in collapse, capital will be extremely scarce. Nobody in the cities reads farm news, or listens to farm reports on the radio. Guess what, though: we are entering the planting season. It will be interesting to learn how many farmers "out there" in the Cheeze Doodle belt are not able to secure loans for this year's crop.

My guess is that the disorder in agriculture will be pretty severe this year, especially since some of the world's most productive places - California, northern China, Argentina, the Australian grain belt - are caught in extremes of drought on top of capital shortages. If the U.S. government is going to try to make remedial policy for anything, it better start with agriculture, to promote local, smaller-scaled farming using methods that are much less dependent on oil byproducts and capital injections.

This will, of course, require a re-allocation of lands suitable for growing food. Our real estate market mechanisms could conceivably enable this to happen, but not without a coherent consensus that it is imperative to do so. If agribusiness as currently practiced doesn't founder on capital shortages, it will surely collapse on disruptions in the oil markets. President Obama at least made a start in the right direction by proposing to eliminate further subsidies to farmers above the $250,000 level. But the situation is really more acute. Surely the US Department of Agriculture already knows about it, but the public may not be interested until the shelves in the Piggly-Wiggly are bare - and then, of course, they'll go crazy.

The recent huge drop in oil prices has left the public once again convinced that the world is drowning in oil - if only the scoundrelly oil companies were forced to deliver it at reasonable prices. The public has been consistently deluded about this for decades. What's missing so far is for the president of the United States to lay out the reality of the situation in a dedicated TV address. I know a lot of you think that Jimmy Carter already tried this and failed to make an impression (and ruined his presidency in the process). I guarantee you that Mr. Obama will have to do this sometime in the next few years whether he likes or not, and he'd be well-advised to get it done sooner rather than later. And by this I don't mean just vague allusions to "energy independence" or "renewables" in speeches devoted to many other issues. I mean telling the public the plain truth that we'll never offset oil depletion and the intelligent response is to do everything possible to transition to walkable towns and public transit, not to sustain the unsustainable.

The alternatives - i.e. what we're trying now - is to further delude ourselves into thinking that we can run Wal-Mart and the suburbs by some other means than oil. Despite all our investments in these things, we won't be able to run them by other means, and the news about this had better get out before enormous disappointment turns into titanic rage. If Americans think they've been grifted by Goldman Sachs and Bernie Madoff, wait until they find out what a swindle the so-called "American Dream" of suburban life turns out to be.

This week, in the power centers of America, attention is fixed on the never-ending fiasco of AIG - a company whose main product turned out to be credit default swaps, and is now choking on them. Kibitzers on the sidelines of finance are forecasting a king-hell bear market suckers' rally in the stock markets followed by a belly flop to Dow 4000 or lower. I myself called for Dow 4000 two years ago - and was obviously a bit off on my timing. All this is surely trouble enough. But while your attention is focused on Rick Santelli in the Chicago trader's pit, or Larry Kudlow desperately seeking "mustard seeds" of new growth in financials, try to let one eye stray to the horizon where these other complex systems are working out their next moves. Farming. The oil markets. These are the coming theaters of alarm and distress.

Regards,

James Howard Kunstler
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Peak Oil, Peak Food and Peak Everything Else
• Supply of Conventional Crude Oil is Very Close to its Peak
• Has Oil Hit Its Peak Price?
• Peak Oil: Supply Data Doesn’t Lie
• A View from the Peak of the Global Economy

Today's Daily Reckoning is equal parts optimism and reality. The reality could be construed, by some, as negative. But it is what it is. So let's get to it. Optimists may want to smile obliviously at this point.

First cab off the rank is oil. Crude futures fell by as much as eight percent in New York during Tuesday trading. A global recession tends to dampen demand for oil. And with traders expecting today's American Petroleum Institute Inventory report to show high gasoline stocks in the U.S., crude it taking its direction from other economic news in the U.S, most of which is awful.

Call us a common horse fly, but we find bad news strangely attractive. There's just something about it we can't resist. Having just completed a fuller look at the oil market for the January edition of Diggers and Drillers, today's oil price action is a good sign. That is, the short-term focus on the fall in crude demand is making energy stocks extremely attractive for the upcoming "back draft" in oil prices you can expect to see later this year.

The seeds of future scarcity in the oil market have been sown by this price crash. The nice thing about stocks is you don't have to wait long to reap. For example, Oil Search (ASX:OSH) was up 4.8% yesterday on the Australian market. It was no Rio Tinto (ASX:RIO), up 10.9%. But it was better than the 3.1% gain on the ASX/200, which itself was a welcome relief for investors shocked by Friday's freefall.

As mentioned in the January D&D issue, Oil Search is one of Credit Suisse's top energy picks for 2009. Credit Suisse rates the firm as "outperform" and says it has target price of $7, an upside of 60% from yesterday's close at $4.36. The other tip from Credit Suisse, by the way, is Santos (ASX:STO).

Neither of these tips are exactly State secrets. But what's interesting is that investors seem to be focussing on Oil Search's LNG future, and not its crude oil production in Papua New Guinea. Fourth quarter sales fell by 42% at OSH, which is what you'd expect when both prices and production volumes fall.

What's more, OSH averaged US$58.15/barrel for its oil in Q4. That was down 39% from the year before, when its average price per barrel was a robust $95.18. You should watch for just this same phenomenon-lower prices and production volumes-to sweep through the base metals and bulk commodity sector earnings later this year (especially after contract prices are renegotiated for iron ore and coal in March and April).

The good news for OSH? It has more cash now that it did the same time last year! Cash increased from $326 million last year to $517 million this year. And the company has no debt, which is nice during a Credit Depression. But the big driver for the stock price, at least according to Credit Suisse, is the $11 billion LNG project the company is planning with ExxonMobil.

"The story for Oil Search is not a production story and therefore by definition not an earnings story either-it's all about delivering the next phase of the progress on LNG," says the Energy 2009 Forecast. "The stock is a leveraged play into the PNG LNG project, which we believe will be one of the few (lower risk) conventional LNG projects to reach final investment decision (FID) in the next 12 months.

All of this is not to tout Oil Search, which is not a stock we've recommended in Diggers and Drillers (nor is it a stock we own). It IS to show that there is plenty of opportunity in the LNG sector in 2009. It's a story Kris Sayce has been dominating over at the Australian Small Cap Investigator for the last two months. What makes it an entrepreneurial story (rather than a strictly resource story) is that LNG is a relatively new industry in Australia. No one knows what its worth yet, or even how to measure which projects will be the most lucrative (or the most likely to find partners and funding and eventually reach production).

What we do know is that Australia has an unusual amount of unconventional energy reserves (coal-seam-gas, LNG, etc). The cost of extracting and producing those reserves is higher than conventional oil and gas production. But global integrated oil companies are eager to get their hands on new reserves wherever they can find them. Thus, start-up Aussie LNG firms are finding big partners with deep pockets. That's where the share price gains could come, despite the collapse in oil prices in 2008. See Kris' story below.

See? There is good news after all.

What about gold? We keep harping on about it. And yes, it's still shiny and money-like. But it did fall back under US$900 overnight. What gives?

The big driver of the gold price this year will be, as always, weakness in the U.S. dollar. Granted, gold is rising against other currencies too (the euro and the British pound). But it's the large increase in the supply of U.S. dollars that will ultimately catapult the yellow metal higher.

Keep in mind, though, that the unwinding of the dollar standard is not going to be a rapid affair. Too many people have too much to lose from a rapid dollar depreciation. We'd expect gold's move to be driven by gradual investor capitulation on common stocks and government bonds. And THAT will be driven by market returns and inflation concerns (both of which should mount as the year progresses).

Another date to watch for is September 26th, 2009. That's when the current European Central Bank Gold Agreement (CBGA) on sales expires. The first CBGA was signed in 1999, and depending on whom you ask, had a rather ambiguous goal. European central banks agreed to limit and publish their announced gold sales.

The reason, we suspect, is that European Central Banks own gold as a reserve asset. Signatories of the first CBGA controlled 43.6% of the world's above ground gold reserves, according to the World Gold Council. The second CBGA was signed in 2004 and limited sales to a maximum of 500 tonnes per year over five years (2,500 tonnes over the length of the agreement). With the expansion of the EU, CBGA signatories now control 46.1% of the above ground gold reserves.

So why cap official CB sales? As much as they prefer their own product-paper money-central banks own gold as a reserve asset. In 1999, the gold price languished at just US$252/ounce. For the CBs, this meant that value of a reserve asset was falling. And with the market wary that further CB sales could flood the gold market with excess supply at a time of lethargic demand, something had to be done to put a floor under the gold price.

In order to assure the market that Central Bank sales would not (at least publicly) be used to suppress/depress the gold price, the CBGA was signed. Since then, it's provided transparency to planned central bank sales of gold. According to the WGC, France and Switzerland were sellers of gold least year, while Russia was a notable buyer.

What will happen, then, when the current five-year agreement expires on September 26th of this year? Well, there's every chance a new agreement will replace it. But since we're in the business of looking for Black Swans, let us entertain the possibility that Central Banks abandon the agreement this year. Why would they do so?

Global central banks are also large holders of U.S. dollars and U.S. dollar-denominated bonds. How reliable do you think either of those as reserve assets? Hmm.

Also keep in mind that gold is now accessible to retail investors in a way it wasn't in 1999. Gold ETFs (if you take them at their word) own over 1,000 tonnes of gold. This makes ETFs the sixth-largest holder of above ground gold (behind the U.S., Germany, the IMF, France, and Italy).

It's not a rash speculation to suggest that Central Banks will prefer to hold on to their gold this year rather than sell it at all. As competitive currency devaluation sweeps the globe in an all-out effort to fight asset deflation and recession, gold will become much more desirable as a reserve asset worth owning (not selling).

Bankers are bankers, after all. Their product is money. But they have gold in their vaults for a reason. It was money before paper was money. So September 26th may mark the end of the orderly and coordinated management of gold sales by European Central Banks. And it may mark the beginning of a new monetary era where gold reasserts its importance as money.

Is this good for gold miners? You bet it is! More on that tomorrow.

How about some reader mail?

Dan Denning,

Very interesting and I concur with the prediction regarding higher energy prices later in the year.
One thing I have a hard time accepting is the deflation argument. How can you have deflation with only fiat currencies left in the world? Deflation means that currency (paper) will rise in value relative to tangibles like houses, cars, oil, steel, copper, etc. etc. I suppose that argument is based on the belief that things will depreciate in value faster than currencies lose purchasing power.

Since there is nothing backing any currency except the good faith and credit of the issuer, how can that "paper" ever be worth more than tangibles when the issuer also controls the printing presses?

Frankly, I can only foresee more inflation big-time as nations print more and more currency to offset (pay off) the enormous deficits that are being created worldwide in the attempt to ward off a recession/depression. What am I missing?

Thanks,

Arthur

You're not missing anything Arthur, as far as we can tell. In a world where the output of goods and services is declining, while the supply of money is going up, you would expect rising prices. The hitch in the giddy up is the massive overhang of debt in the Western world. With $52 trillion in total credit market debt in the U.S. alone , asset values (housing and shares) are already grossly inflated. We reckon they will have to fall a lot more before the factors you cite-paper currencies and deficit spending-begin to cause inflation. The money supply is headed in one direct (up), while total credit market assets are headed in the other (down). The closer they get to each other, the more you'll start to see rising prices.

Dan,

I think you are overlooking one factor on the housing affordability. And that is the standard of the house. This is why housing affordability has gotten less - expectations. New 21-year old home buyers now want a modern 4-bedroom first home with a gourmet kitchen, not a ramshackle 2-3 bedroom house to get started like we all bought 30 years ago. Australia may have the least affordable housing, but it is probably the highest housing standard too in some pretty nice bits of the world. Sure a flash house on the Gold or Sunshine Coast is going to be more expensive that a crappy house in the US mid-West.

Nigel.

You get what you pay for? Maybe. Location certainly matters. In the beautiful parts of the world, we reckon there is always someone willing to pay just a bit more for the privilege of a good view. But eight times median income? Is that some kind of new sunshine/square metre multiple we're unaware of?

Dan,

I'm puzzled by your support for the theory of Peak Oil. It seems to me that this theory belongs with the predictions of Thomas Malthus, on the scrap heap.

While it's true that there is only a limited amount of oil in the world and that therefore production must eventually reach a peak and decline, that only addresses the supply side of the equation, and only in part. It could make a difference in the short term, but the shorter the term you are using to judge it is, the less impact it can make.

Over a longer term, one must also look at demand. As prices rise, demand contracts. People start taking public transport more often, car-pooling, or switching to hybrid or electric cars (which are fuelled, ultimately, mostly by coal or uranium). As prices rise, demand falls, over the medium and long terms. Further, demand switches to alternatives that, like uranium, have much greater reserves.

The price rises also affect supply. Suppliers pump their existing facilities faster. Alternatives to drilled oil that are more expensive to produce, such as oil/tar sands, deep-sea oil deposits (if they exist) and biodiesel, become economically viable, increasing supply. Supply does not necessarily increase sufficiently to replace that which has been lost, and because some of it is more expensive it puts a higher floor price under oil. However, it does mitigate the increase in oil price.

The overall effect of this is that even though oil production is declining, any rise in price caused by that decline will act to increase supply and reduce demand. Even though this may not happen much in the short term, nor will oil supply decline much in the short term (or rise - oil production facilities take a long time to turn on or off). So whilst I agree with you that oil prices will go up this year on short-term supply and demand, I think you are very mistaken to cite Peak Oil as a reason.

LM

Be puzzled no more! You write a very sensible e-mail which we'd not argue with too much. It comes down to a few issues: production and substitution. It's true high prices induce producers to produce more.

But this, in our view, only accelerates the rate of production decline(depletion) in the world's major oil fields. And it's worth noting that the incentive of high prices has not led to new highs in annual world oil production (about 86mbpd). It's hard to argue that global oil production has not truly peaked.

Price rises also reduce demand, as you note. But that merely lowers the depletion rate of existing oil fields. It doesn't solve the problem of inevitable production declines as reserves are fully produced. And you are also right than in a normal market, rising prices lead to substitution. Savvy shoppers begin looking for cheaper ways to get the same benefit or service.

The trouble is there is no easy substitute for oil as a transportation fuel. If you're eating bananas and they get expensive, you can always switch to apples or grapes. But oil is not fruit.

We have nearly 100 years of fixed capital investment in a transportation and industrial production system based on hydrocarbons. That amount of sunk investment can't just be switched over night to, say, biofuels or electric cars. It's a massive economic and social transformation.

Or, put another way, there is no easy substitute for oil. Malthus was wrong because he did not account for human innovation and increased in productivity through technology (which allow us to feed more people). Malthus assumed that human population would grow faster than human food production (geometric vs. arithmetic growth).

But, in no small part thanks to the use of petroleum in fertiliser products, it was food production that grew even faster than human population growth in the 19th and 20th centuries. This allowed for millions of people to move off farms in the country and into factories in the city powered by oil, and building goods that would run on hydrocarbons. The energy boom created massive caloric surplus.

In fact, population growth has since exploded. The planet has plenty of resources to feed 6.5 billion people. But bungled national trade and farm policies get in the way and make food more expensive than it ought to be. However we digress.

The plenitude economist Julian Simon held that resources are never physically scare, only economically scare. Simon believed that when a thing became too expensive to use (price signals) a free economy would find or migrate toward a cheaper substitute or alternative. All things being equal, we believe Simon is generally right.

In this case, the energy we get from oil has to be replaced by energy from somewhere else. But where? That is a question for physics, not philosophers. The energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) is a real calculation that measures how realistic any given energy source is as a substitute for oil. There are not a lot of good substitutes, and by good we mean competitive with oil and an EROEI basis.

Our forecast? The car is here to stay. But the internal combustion engine's long reign of dominance may be at an end. Over at the Australian Small Cap Investigator, we've been looking at electric cars and plug in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV). New batteries (with lithium and rare earth elements) are the key to viability of this new industry. And surprisingly, Australia has several firms with some cards t play. It's not all bad news!

How about one more?

Is it possible in your view, that the present turmoil is an early warning that while capitalism is a fine self regulating system in the short to medium term, it must by definition ultimately fail?

Since it is dependent on constant growth, and a reduction in the rate of growth seen as recessionary, does it not breach the fundamental law that perpetual growth in a finite system must ultimately implode?

If growth is the product of consumption and population is it not inherently self limiting?

John C.

Gladstone Queensland

This is too big a subject for today's e-mail. But we promise to address it tomorrow. Send your own thoughts to dr@dailyreckoning.com.au

Dan Denning

for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Pemex and Mexican Peak Oil Equal Expensive Oil
• No Spike in Oil Price Following IEA “Third Oil Shock” Announcement
• Australian Trade Deficit Grows for 75th Consecutive Month
• The Rise in the Dollar Doesn’t Have Everyone Convinced
• Peak Oil: Supply Data Doesn’t Lie

We have 6.5 billion people on Earth, with more arriving every day. A fortunate few hundred million of us already live in the developed world. And now several billion other souls are working their way out of poverty, and that takes resources.

So the world demand for everything (energy, steel, cement, food, water, you name it) is rising. And that demand is bumping up against physical limits of resources and/or the ability of mankind to extract those resources. As the saying goes, "Whoops!"

So the "View From the Peak" analogy is also to mountain climbing. The most dangerous part of any mountain climb is not necessarily climbing uphill. It's often the descent.

On the way down, there is this sense that you understand the mountain, because you climbed it. But going down a mountain is quite a bit different than going up. So beware the false sense of understanding and security as things start to unwind.

On the energy front, we've seen several days of declining prices. Oil has led the way, falling from about $146 to $126. Coal and natural gas sold down, as well, as did many energy companies and service firms.

So we've seen quite a tumble, led by declining oil. But then again, oil had quite a run-up. I've said before that oil was climbing too far, too fast. And over the past few weeks, oil tested the $150 mark. But like Gen. Pickett at Gettysburg, this charge to $150 failed.

What seems pretty clear is that at $140, a lot of things in this world just don't work anymore. Airlines are, obviously, one business not built around highly priced oil. Worldwide, 24 airlines have gone bankrupt so far this year.

But there are other parts of the transport system, the food system and the economy that are cratering with the oil run-up.

Sure, a lot of things don't work well even with oil at $130, $120 or $110. But that's not the point. It seems that above $140, the developing world just stops developing. We saw pain at $100 and above. We were beginning to see true demand destruction above $140. So oil pulled back, and perhaps for a while.

I should add that the recent rally in financials pulled a lot of money out of oil.

Last week, the U.S. monetary authorities made a fateful decision. Rather than let Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fail, or take these two horribly mismanaged firms over via receivership, the U.S. Fed and Treasury Department, essentially, nationalized the bad risks and socialized the losses. This is going to come back to haunt and hurt us, like a guy with a chain saw on Halloween night.

And despite the oil pullback, crude petroleum is still double the price of what it was just two years ago. So we are living with a 100% increase in the nominal oil price.

The oil run-up was not all just insatiable demand meeting flat supply. I've discussed this in other articles. The U.S. dollar has been mismanaged for decades, and thus we live in chronically inflationary times. And couple this with the horrid shenanigans of Wall Street and the overall U.S. banking system in this modern era. Ugh!

Remember how some people used to dismiss the fact that the U.S. was deindustrializing? Remember how some people used to praise the so- called "service economy"? They would say things like, "The U.S. capital markets are the most efficient in the world."

To which we now reply, "Oh, really?"

How could the U.S. banking and finance system ever have gotten so bad? Don't we have regulators who are supposed to look over the shoulders of the bankers? Don't they teach people how to be careful in business schools? Heck, here at Agora Financial, we've been writing about the looming implosion for several years. It's not like it was some state secret.

So now we are at the moment of decision. How many billions of dollars does the U.S. banking system have to lose? OK, how many tens of billions? Hundreds of billions? When you add in the toxic derivative instruments, it adds up to trillions of dollars. And it looks like the nation is on the hook for a lot of it.

Where can things go from here, what with all that worthless paper floating around?

At this stage, I can only re-emphasize that you ought to own some precious metals. Own gold or silver coins or bars, ETFs or small- or large-cap shares. But own something. It may well be the only way you can preserve your savings and purchasing power over the long haul.

Byron King
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

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