An interesting article about Oil Production

[TheMercenary]

From The NYT.

Amid High Oil Prices, Danger Signs in Production

snip:

The outlook for oil supplies “signals a period of unprecedented scarcity,” an analyst at CIBC World Markets, Jeff Rubin, said last week.

Oil prices might reach more than $200 by 2012, he said, a level that would probably mean $7-a-gallon gasoline in the United States.

Some regions are simply running out of reserves. Norway’s production has slumped by 25 percent since its peak in 2001. In Britain, oil production has plummeted 43 percent in eight years. The North Sea is now considered a dying oil basin. Alaska’s giant field at Prudhoe Bay has declined 65 percent since its peak 20 years ago.

In many other places, the problems are not located below ground, as energy executives like to put it, but above ground. Higher petroleum taxes and more costly licensing agreements, scarce manpower and swelling costs, as well as political wrangling and violence, are making it much harder to raise production.

The whole article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/bu...il-WEB.html?hp