Peak-oil' doomsayers catch Wall St.'s attention

[villager]

Peak-oil' doomsayers catch Wall St.'s attention

By Deepak Gopinath Bloomberg News

Published: September 1, 2006

PISA On a sweltering midsummer Tuesday in the fields outside Pisa, Willem Kadijk scribbled notes as a ragtag troupe of doomsayers predicted the end of the Oil Age.

With his shaved head, jeans and sandals, Kadijk, 48, blended into a crowd gathered under a white tent to hear of the coming calamity. The death of cheap, abundant crude oil, the forecasters warned, might unleash war and plunge the world into a second Great Depression. That is not the prophecy of some apocalyptic cult. Kadijk, a hedge fund adviser, had flown from Amsterdam to attend a conference on a geologic theory known as peak oil.

Proponents of this controversial idea say that global oil production is now at or near its zenith. Once the flow crests and starts to decline - and some geologists say that it already has - oil will no longer be able to slake the world's growing thirst for energy.

The result will be the oil shock to end all oil shocks. The price of a barrel of crude will spiral to $200 - and keep rising. To the "peaksters," today's energy crunch is nothing next to the pain that is to come. "Peak oil is a reality," said Kadijk, a senior equity salesman at Kepler Equities, a brokerage in Amsterdam. He plans to start a fund to capitalize on what he sees as a looming crisis for the world's fossil-fuel-based economy and the ultimate bull market in oil.

As energy prices soar and violence convulses the Middle East, the peak-oil movement - an unlikely alliance of geologists, physicists, oil industry consultants and environmental activists - is winning converts.

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Everyone agrees that the world will run out of crude eventually. Oil, after all, is a finite resource: The Earth holds only so much of it. The debate centers on when a global peak will occur and what will happen afterward.
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"Peak oil is a reality," said Kadijk, a senior equity salesman at Kepler Equities, a brokerage in Amsterdam. He plans to start a fund to capitalize on what he sees as a looming crisis for the world's fossil-fuel-based economy and the ultimate bull market in oil.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/31/bloomberg/bxoil.php

[Robbien]

1. Wall Street doesn't believe it, but they are ready to use

it to speculate on the price of oil. They are playing the game for big speculation bucks while we pay for their games at the pump.