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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (19988)	12/31/2004 1:09:13 AM
From: mishedlo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

A Midwinter Night's Mare Over fifty percent of the almost 100 million barrels of oil the world uses every day comes from a handful of irreplaceable fields in five tiny regions of the world. And the story is the same in every one of them. Greed, profit motive, impatience, arrogance, and out and out ignorance, have deprived future generations of what could have been while saddling them with the debt for what was. Saddam cranked his wells past recommended production limits as a result of years of UN Sanctions and to generate badly needed cash, ironically, and perhaps fittingly, leaving the US move to grab the energy reserves little to show for the endless procession of dead and maimed bodies. Our blood-soaked gory prizes in Rumulia and Kirkuk are sandy formations saturated with brine coughing up smelly, water-tainted crude, half of which is lost through cracking pipes and rusted pump stations targeted for destruction by furious insurgents. Kuwaiti fields are in about the same shape as Ghawar, same for the fields in the UAE. We know little about the state of Awiz these days, the largest reserve in Iran, but it's a pretty safe guess that since all these fields have been operating as long as Ghawar and managed by the same inept corrupt chimpanzee conglomerates who managed Saudi Arabia's only treasure, that the story is the same. Outside of the Middle East, Mexico's Cantarell field has recently just peaked and is now in decline, and the Venezuelan fields are likely to be at or near peak. Despite new finds in the North Sea the UK is now a net importer and the same goes for Norway. China has a large producing field but they use every liter of it and no one expects them to start sharing. Russia is nearing that same limit. No matter how many new finds you read about, if the country of origin uses more than they produce, it doesn't do the US a damn bit of good. brentrasmussen.com