Experts Raise Oil Supply Concerns

11.01.07

Leading figures from the Middle East oil industry are warning that the world is struggling to sustain rising oil production.

"Supply may not be possible to increase beyond a certain level, say around 100 million barrels," Libya's National Oil Corp chairman Shokri Ghanem said at the annual Oil & Money conference. "In some countries, production is going down and we are not discovering any more of those huge oil wells we used to discover in the Sixties or the Fifties."

Sadad al-Husseini, a key architect of Saudi Arabian energy production policy while at Saudi Aramco, said world oil production had already peaked. "We are already three years into level production," he told the conference.

In contrast, the International Energy Agency has said that supply will rise from 86 million barrels per day now to 116 million by 2030 to meet demand.

About World Energy