Posted on 04/14/2008 3:33:59 PM PDT by DeaconBenjamin
Russian oil production has peaked and may never return to current levels, one of the country’s top energy executives has warned, fuelling concerns that the world’s biggest oil producers cannot keep up with rampant Asian demand.
The warning comes as crude oil prices are trading near their record high of $112 a barrel, stoking inflation in many countries.
Leonid Fedun, the 52-year-old vice-president of Lukoil, Russia’s largest independent oil company, told the Financial Times he believed last year’s Russian oil production of about 10m barrels a day was the highest he would see “in his lifetime”. Russia is the world’s second biggest oil producer.
Mr Fedun compared Russia with the North Sea and Mexico, where oil production is declining dramatically, saying that in the oil-rich region of western Siberia, the mainstay of Russian output, “the period of intense oil production [growth] is over”.
The Russian government has so far admitted that production growth has stagnated, but has shied away from admitting that post-Soviet output has peaked.
Viktor Khristenko, Russia’s energy minister who is pushing for tax cuts that could stimulate investment, said last week: “The output level we have today is a plateau, stagnation.”
Russia was until recently considered as the most promising oil region outside the Middle East. Its rapid output growth in the early 2000s helped to meet booming Chinese demand and limited the rise in oil prices.
The trend, however, has turned, with supply dropping below year-ago levels for the first time this decade, according to the International Energy Agency, the energy watchdog.
Oil futures on Monday rose to $111.79 a barrel, just below last week’s record of $112.21 a barrel.
They have applied the Hugo Chavez method of nationalization, that couldn’t have helped.
Translation: Time to say something alarmist to keep oil prices going up.
Mexico has plenty of oil. It’s just that the state oil company is stuffed to the gills with incompetent freeloaders.
I imagine the same thing is happening in Russia. Expropriate the oilfields from foreign companies that know what they are doing, skim off the gravy, and pretty soon the whole thing starts going down the tubes.
Then you invite foreign oil companies in to develop more oil for expropriation. But in Russia’s case, it’s much too soon. Some of them were burned pretty recently.
This wouldn’t be happening if they hadn’t nationalized Yukos. Gazprom, the big government/mafia partnership that owns everything energy related in Russia today is just the same old Soviet bureaucracy that used to run the energy sector in the USSR.
Russia has huge areas of resources that they have only begun to produce.
the old ‘prices went up on speculation prices would go up’ trick
Multiple sources list the former Soviet Union as increasing in production.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/ipsr/t22.xls
http://www.opec.org/home/Monthly%20Oil%20Market%20Reports/2008/pdf/MR032008.pdf
I wonder how many leftists are shorting oil stocks a year from now on the belief that President Obama will force the oil companies to give back their evil profits.
Precisely correct!
Interesting that he mentioned his "lifetime".
Perhaps he was made painfully aware of how short his "lifetime" would be if he didn't make say USSRv2.0 had reached its "peak oil"?
I know. God if we could just get the talking points right we could get this all back down to $90 a barrel, and then we would all be just fine. SHEEESHH. /s
I have a saying: He who has the last barrell of oil will rule the world. Hopefully, that won’t be Russia, Saudi Arabia, or Iran.
I’m pretty sure the Saudis don’t have any coal.
Don’t think the Iranians have much, if any.
Russians probably have a pile.
We have a lot, especially if we mine the stuff Clinton locked up for his Indonesian buddies.
The last barrel of oil will likely be converted from coal, probably from Fischer-Tropsch or perhaps a successor process.
Peak oil is nothing. Russia is working on a deal to sell oil to Germany in Euros....Big oh oh
russia-cornering-the-energy-market-forgawdsakes-people-put-on-your-glasses.
If we start getting our oil from coal, it won’t last long.
Just one of the sources while we develop our oil shale.
Define “long”.
200+ years?
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