from brentrasmussen.com, "A Midwinter Night's Mare",

Ghawar in Saudi Arabia is the largest single oil reservoir on the planet, pumping out an estimated 5 million plus barrels a day. It took millions of years for cyano-bacteria to convert and store the solar radiation, settle to the sea floor, form thick mats, slowly transform into a rich organic syrup, and migrate into high pressure reserves. Ghawar is the crown jewel in our energy treasure chest, the king of them all. But it is dying, we are killing it, and as goes Ghawar, so goes world production...

We use oil because it is by far the cheapest and most convenient form of stored energy many times over... and production is peaking while consumption climbs. The consensus among those in the Petrology Community is that global oil production will peak within five years or so, maybe less, while world oil consumption, fueled largely by the insatiable US addiction and the burgeoning economies in Asia-India, continues to grow steadily. Production Vs consumption. Those lines will cross next year. What happens then?

via the farmer at corrente.


(It's all the Chinese's fault, of course. I mean, if they didn't lend us so much money, we couldn't build so many SUVs. And who told them to use more gas too?)