If oil supplies have been tight, demand has been expanding briskly, and in China where else?
Alter and Fishman have misstated the impact that analysts think U.S. crude oil supplies will have on world prices in order to scare readers into thinking that the American oil miracle will sow the seeds of social unrest in petrostates.
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Rising US oil production, along with increased Saudi output, has helped provide offsetting supplies that have made the sanctions on Iranian oil much more successful than anticipated a year ago.
After all, if the Arctic does not provide new supplies of oil, they will have to be obtained somewhere else.
While Iraq has huge supplies of oil, those who have been examining Iraq's oil producing infrastructure say it is not in great shape.
The members of Congress said while national attention has focused on high prices and low supplies of gasoline, heating oil stocks have fallen to "dangerously" low levels, down 63 percent on the East Coast from a year ago.
"Instability in Venezuela is the real risk, because that could have a dramatic impact on global oil supplies, " said Mark Jones, a Venezuela expert at Rice University.
In large part, the onus of providing adequate oil and gas supplies will be on those countries that have the reserves but are not allowing their development, either at all or at economic levels.
The magnitude of this travesty is evident in the North's belief that it could act with impunity concerning the pilots it captured and killed, even though the United States is supposed to have enormous leverage in the form of oil supplies, multi-billion reactors and normalized political and economic ties.
Leading Total executives have told Forbes recently that they believe global oil supplies will peak out at 95 million bpd sometime in the next 10 years.
And that means, yes, increasing domestic production and off-shore drilling, but we only have 3 percent of the world's oil supplies and we use 25 percent of the world's oil.
Shale oil and gas have emerged as a viable way to boost energy supplies.
Many have already moved to reduce Iranian purchases and new oil supplies.
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Fears about the security of oil supplies from the world's most important oil-exporting region have pushed oil prices up sharply as the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has worsened dramatically.
The invention of new ways to extract gas and oil out or shale formations means we now have hundreds of years of supplies of low cost, clean burning natural gas.
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"There are ample supplies beneath the surface of the planet to have significant growth in oil supply for quite a number of years, " Yergin says.
Collective efforts to block oil shipments from Iran have forced Asian and European countries to look for alternative supplies from Saudi Arabia, Russia and other producers.
Chinese oil and coal companies have been looking overseas in their quest to secure energy supplies, pitching the Chinese flag in places like Sudan, which Western companies had largely abandoned under international pressure.
Oil producers would seem to be the ones most likely to sell oil and drive prices down, but some of them also have access to physical supplies, key to any real manipulation.
Recent moves by big oil and gas consumers such as India and China, keen to acquire the energy assets that they believe will ensure supplies for their booming economies, have further limited the opportunity for the oil majors to replenish reserves.
Regardless of their environmental benefits, alternative energy supplies have not yet proved cheap or abundant enough to wean the rich countries from their oil addiction.
On Dec. 13, the International Energy Agency said if Iranian supplies were cut off by sanctions, refiners in the Mediterranean would have to pay higher prices for oil from other suppliers.
American exports of finished gasoline have soared in the past two years to record levels, as growth in U.S. oil supplies outstrip domestic gasoline demand.
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