Saturday, July 21, 2007

Russian & Mexico Need Money for Infrastructure

Jim Landers of the Dallas Morning News wrote on Tuesday, July 17, 2007 that Russia and Mexico, along with OPEC members such as Venezuela, Kuwait and Iran, will have to bring huge sums of their own investment capital to bear on increasing oil and gas production, or energy prices will soar well beyond their historic highs. Without increasing current oil production facilities that could mean pushing past $5 gasoline and $100-a-barrel oil.

This concept that not enough oil is going to be produced is the consensus among the world's oil-consuming nations, expressed by such forums as the Group of Eight, which held its summit this year in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation nations, and the industrialized countries of the International Energy Agency.

Jim Landers also writes that one forecast looms above the rest in this worldview that the country of China which today has 9 million automobiles will have 150 million by 2030 putting tremendous pressure on the world oil supply.

The experts believe that China is expected to account for one-third of the increase in oil demand in the next two decades and in the meantime two-thirds of the world's known oil and gas reserves are in countries that either limit access or close the reserves to foreign companies, said Karen Harbert, assistant United States secretary of energy for policy and international affairs.

Again it is worth repeating that those countries are not stepping up to the task, including Russia won't be able to meet existing gas contracts to Europe without reversing the downward investment curve in exploration and production in its natural gas fields. Venezuela's oil production is off by half and it is the same basic story – these countries are going to maintain their monopoly on their oil fields, but if expansion is to occur it will be with other people’s money, but no one at the moment is ready to spend the money in the monopoly countries under their proposed terms and conditions as they exist today..

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