AutoblogGreen

1. This has been coming for a long time. A president without his head planted in his _ss would have made alternative fuels ready to head off these kinds of problems. It's almost as if Bush will profit somehow, from oil prices going higher.
Oh wait, he will. That's nice to know he'll be taken care of after he loses his job in November.

Posted at 12:27PM on May 5th 2008 by Ancon44

2. Invade 'em.

Posted at 12:36PM on May 5th 2008 by why not the LS2LS7?

3. why not the LS2LS7?, it worked in Iraq, right?

Posted at 12:40PM on May 5th 2008 by rar

4. Won't do any good to invade, the fuel used up by all the tanks, HUMVEEs, and military aircraft would be more than the extra oil we could get.

Mexico has peaked.

Posted at 12:50PM on May 5th 2008 by BlackbirdHighway

5. Mexico could produce plenty more oil... but rather than reinvest, they simply pocketted the oil income.

Cantarell was never their largest field. Their largest field is Chicontepec. However, Chicontepec requires horizontal drilling, a lot of wells, reservoir improvement techniques, and so on; it's an expensive field to develop. Cantarell was easy; they found it when a fisherman complained about oil ruining his nets, and each well gladly gave 10-20k barrels per day. What'd they do? They just sat on Cantarell as though it was going to last forever.

Morons.

They also could have looked for deepwater oil (they stumbled into one, Noxal, except it turned out to be mostly natural gas instead). They don't have a very good deepwater exploration program, and their ability to develop deepwater fields is even more lacking. And their laws made it near impossible for them to do joint ventures with international oil companies so they could learn for themselves.

Let's see if they can get themselves out of this hole they've dug themselves into. If they can, it'll probably be at least a decade.

Posted at 1:45PM on May 5th 2008 by KarenRei

6. Uh oh. This year isn't shaping up to be a fun one.

Posted at 1:51PM on May 5th 2008 by Rick

7. No need to invade them when they are invading US!

Posted at 3:24PM on May 5th 2008 by Tim

8. "1. This has been coming for a long time. A president without his head planted in his _ss would have made alternative fuels ready to head off these kinds of problems"

Yes, Bill Clinton did NOTHING about energy reduction in the USA. He did just the opposite. He allowed SUVs to grow with abandon and failed miserably to restrain consumption. So it will take another 8 years to get this right because Bill Clinton DID NOTHING for his 8 years except encourage consumption. Too bad, another 8 years wasted by Pres Clinton. Of course, his "head" was not up his ars, it was too busy in other affairs of state.

Posted at 4:09PM on May 5th 2008 by Dad

9. "1. This has been coming for a long time. A president without his head planted in his _ss would have made alternative fuels ready to head off these kinds of problems"

Yes, Bill Clinton did NOTHING about energy reduction in the USA. He did just the opposite. He allowed SUVs to grow with abandon and failed miserably to restrain consumption. So it will take another 8 years to get this right because Bill Clinton DID NOTHING for his 8 years except encourage consumption. Too bad, another 8 years wasted by Pres Clinton. Of course, his "head" was not up his ars, it was too busy with other "affairs" of state. I know this may be too much for some of you to "swallow", but it is true.

Posted at 4:09PM on May 5th 2008 by Dad

10. "Unless some other supplier can or does step up and fill the gap, oil supplies in the U.S. will definitely be tightening in the next few years, meaning that prices at the pump will likely climb further. "

And since oil is a zero sum game, the cost of fuel will rise everywhere, not just the USA.

Posted at 4:10PM on May 5th 2008 by Dad

11. This is significant but wasn't it Brazil who recently announced the biggest find in decades just recently?

Posted at 4:26PM on May 5th 2008 by gsolman6

12. Everyone's been touting it as the biggest in decades, but to me, it seems that they're forgetting about Ferdows-Mounds-Zagheh. :P And there have been plenty of smaller supergiants found in the past decade. And even if there hadn't, there's always virtually limitless, dirty-as-heck syncrude.

The twin problems are production price and how much risk the oil companies are willing to take on (if you spend a fortune to develop an expensive deepwater field, then prices fall, you're in big trouble). This is amplified by a weak dollar and commodities speculation.

Mexico's problem is that they treated Cantarell as an eternal bounty and didn't bother to reinvest the money they made into Chicontepec or deepwater oil. It's like cooking your seed corn.

Posted at 6:25PM on May 5th 2008 by KarenRei

13. The solution would be ANWAR and tell the eco freaks who are wrong to give up their cars tohelp but they will not the hypocrites

Posted at 7:50PM on May 5th 2008 by American

14. YES lets drill in ANWAR! I cannot wait to use up all of their 3 months supply of oil. By God, thats the real solution to declining production.

Posted at 9:02AM on May 6th 2008 by wayne

15. Maybe if we threaten to build a fence and also return every illegal Mexican immigrant currently living in America, the Mexican government will find a way to maintain their oil production. A little motivation goes a long way. Not too damn likely, but it would be fun to stir the pot with our neighbors to the south.

Posted at 10:02AM on May 6th 2008 by revoltin'

16. Failing to reinvest back into more production is not just a Mexican issue - as more and more oil is controlled solely by national governments, the temptation to milk the oil sector increases.

Venezuela has also seen a marked drop in its production, again, because the current government has chosen to loot the oil sector, even forgoing needed maintenance/repairs (forget new exploration/development)

It's also increaingly popular to turn to third world companies as a form of protest, but Chinese or Iranian firms are far behind Western firms such as Exxon-Mobil, BP, or Total in the ability to efficiently develop fields, especially the newer, harder to reach oil discoveries.

Posted at 10:23AM on May 6th 2008 by Bill

17. We don't need oil from these other countries, we have plenty here if they (USA) would start drilling but the envirmentalist are against that. It's up to private enterprise to come up with alternatives. Don't blame the Presidents just because you don't like them. Congress are the ones responsable and neither party has done anything to make things better.

Posted at 3:56PM on May 7th 2008 by kydon

18. Are we sure they're not just sending it to China or North Korea?

Posted at 8:31AM on May 8th 2008 by ss