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Oil & energy roundup

A few articles and points to round out some of the oil and energy news that's recently been made public.

First off, Matthew Simmons provides a brief commentary on the oil supply/demand picture going forward. In "Underestimating Demand, Overestimating Supply", Simmons declares that the experts' estimates of world oil supply and demand have been proved totally wrong:

In retrospect, the best way to review key fundamentals is to look carefully at changes in global supply and demand, and where they’ve come from. Between 1991 and 2005, global demand for oil grew by 16.6 million b/d. More astonishing is that non-FSU demand grew from 58.9 million b/d in 1991 to 79.8 million barrels a day in 2005. In other words, outside the unanticipated collapse of the Former Soviet Union, the rest of the world's oil demand grew by 20.9 million barrels a day in just 14 years (35%; 2.5% per year) vs. the projection by many oil pundits that oil demand growth was certainly slowing down.

Further work by the Peak Oil Review Editors shows that "total supply gain in Russia and China was offset by the increased domestic consumption in those two countries". As those countries reach peak production sometime in the next decade, will the other oil producing countries be able to generate major increases and keep supply growing? See the above link for more.

You might remember the post earlier this week about the recent Gulf of Mexico oil discovery. Randy Kirk makes a few points regarding this discovery in the article, "Clarification of the Huge Chevron Oil Discovery", at Energy Bulletin. In fact, Mr. Kirk points out that the discovery may have more impact on the natural gas market than oil. Check it out.

In renewable energy news, solar panel manufacturers continue to struggle through the polysilicon shortage. For more on how solar companies are coping with a scarcity for one of their essential components, see "Solar World: Desperately seeking silicon". That link brought to us by the theoildrum.com in their September 8 edition of DrumBeat.

For more on advances in solar panel manufacturing and a great many other alternative energy items, see The Energy Blog, another great site.

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