One of features of the global peak in oil production is that you will not know when it happened until sometime later - an increasing number of commentators are wondering whether the daily production peak hasn't already passed some time in 2006 - we have been struggling as a world to produce more than 84 million barrels of crude oil a day for some time now.

Today an new peak in oil prices was reached with West Texas Intermediate Crude oil closing at over $90 per barrel in some markets. This is very close to being a record high in real (inflation adjusted) terms - about the same as the peak reached during the Iranian affair some decades ago.

Whenever the production peak actually occurs (or occurred) we know that from then on production will never again be able to match demand, and so the price will inexorably rise. Around the peak the predictions are that we will see a lot of volatility in oil market prices as chunks of demand get destroyed or substituted and the price falls back to meet the reduced demand before ratcheting up again.

The price has ratcheted up $10 in almost exactly a month since it last breached the $80 'barrier'. If you look at the historical charts then you see exactly the sort of fluctuating upward trend that you would expect around the production peak.

It may be that we have less time than we thought to convert our lifestyles to a low oil world - once shortages start to bite you can expect that there will be an imposition from government of a set of priorities for fuel distribution - and private motoring is likely to be fairly near the bottom of the list. How will this impact our lives in Caradon, in particular for those of us who live outside the towns?...

Come to the next film show on 9th November and start to get a vision of where we might be headed.