The Weekly Wrap: November 12, 2010

The battle over oil demand. Over at the Financial Times’ Energy Source, Kiran Stacey explores the varying oil demand projections of OPEC and the International Energy Agency. The IEA projects oil demand of 99 million barrels a day by 2035. OPEC thinks it’s going to be more like 116-121 million barrels a day. While it is impossible to reliably predict oil prices, supply, or demand, it is not an inconsequential exercise to try, since so much is at stake. Currently, the world uses about 85 million barrels a day. The prevailing wisdom falls into the OPEC camp; these thinkers look at China especially and see a huge uptick in demand going forward. A compelling minority of thinkers says the majority fails to consider underlying political trends in China; they say that China’s oil demand curve will not be anywhere as steep as the majority believes.

For Japan, the rare earths embargo goes on. China continues to block Japan’s rare earths. Beijing had signaled that the cutoff of the strategic elements was over, but Keith Bradsher at the New York Times quotes metals traders who say that while exports have been restored to the United States, not so for Japan. The unofficial export ban to Japan began Sept. 21 with a fishing dispute in the East China Sea and spiraled into an international incident.

Beets, anyone? Energy guru Charlie Maxwell forecasts $300 oil by the end of the decade, and a higher diet of root plants. Speaking with Olivier Ludwig of IndexUniverse, Maxwell points to depletion as the key factor — the natural pressure in old oil fields is dropping, and by 2015 or so the energy world will begin to be out of balance. Demand will begin to exceed supply, and a price spiral will begin. When that happens, our current lifestyles will start to be too expensive. Maxwell says that the only way out is more energy efficiency.

Costly but with a high envy quotient. With the gift-giving holidays upon us, the world’s luxury carmakers respond with sleek, fast and comfy wheels for the green-minded, Vanessa Furmans reports at the Wall Street Journal. Hybrid entries are here or about to be from Bentley, BMW, Ferrari, Mercedes, and Porsche. They carry steep price tags — Porsche may charge north of $600,000 for the model it expects to market in 2013.

The latest oil boomtown. The oil flow is picking up out of long-declining producer Iraq, reports Chip Cummins of the Wall Street Journal. Cummins profiles the world’s newest oil boomtown, Basra. The activity is the object of much attention because, to the degree that Iraq can boost production toward its target of 12 million barrels a day from the current 2.5 million barrels a day, the country will reduce concerns of a price spike in the latter part of the current decade. The consensus among analysts is that the production aim is quite high, but that Iraq may be able to reach about 6 million barrels a day.

Autumn of the son-in-law. Finally, we turn to the travails of Rakhat Aliyev, the estranged former son-in-law of petro-state leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan. For the last three years — ever since Nazarbayev ran Aliyev out of the country under still unclear circumstances — Aliyev, on a blog at LiveJournal, has been providing a gusher of entertaining taped conversations, articles, and even a book that he says expose the corruption and general perfidy of his former father-in-law. On Tuesday that came to an end with the unexplained suspension of the blog, reports Lenta.ru. LiveJournal is owned by SUP, a Russian media company.