Bob Tippee
Editor

The oil market seems to have panicked over the possibility that the end of oil availability has come into view.

Market analysts have begun tingeing their comments with allusions to depletion, and industry celebrity T. Boon Pickens Jr. has declared supply can't meet demand (OGJ Online, May 21, 2008).

Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency, watered peak-oil weeds in the garden of comfort recently by telling the Wall Street Journal that his agency's annual outlook, due in November, will include sharply reduced forecasts of supply.

Prices of marker crudes increased as though the world had just now begun running out of oil, which it has been doing for a long time. The problem is wide variation in interpretation of the phrase "running out of oil."

Serious and learned observers believe global oil production soon will peak and quickly begin a steep decline.

Others, equally serious and learned except to those holding opposing views, see a peak and decline of less-alarming imminence and rate.