The Investment  Strategists

Energy is the lifeblood of any economy. But when an economy is based on an exponential debt-based money system and that is based on exponentially increasing energy supplies, the supply of that energy therefore deserves our very highest attention.

But we need to be careful here because it’s a mistake to lump all types of energy together because they have very different uses in our economy and they are not interchangeable.

What we’re going to examine in this chapter on Peak Cheap Oil is transportation fuels. The liquids we put in our trucks and cars and airplanes. Why?

Because 95% of everything that moves from point A to point B across the globe does so based on petroleum derived liquid fuels. This makes petroleum quite special and unique.

And despite vastly increasing the global spend on oil operations, despite the shale oil "miracle" so loudly touted by the press -- global production remains nearly unchanged. In just a few short years, it’s now costing us double to extract roughly the same amount of oil out of the ground.

What’s clearly at work here is that we’re finding more oil, but it’s expensive. Yet total global demand for oil will climb as developing countries expand their economies and world population continues to grow. Competition for hydrocarbons will become more fierce than it has ever been.

I’m soft-pedaling this to an enormous degree. Let me be blunt. If we are already at peak, as the data suggest is possible, then we are all in trouble.