One of the areas i find most worrying is when you look into lead times for the UK expanding import capacity. You cant help but wonder how, even if we get through this winter we would be able to get through 2006 with depletion continuing at such a rate. With most new projects only coming online in 2007/2008 we could face quite a crunch period.

clv101 makes an excellent point about the transport issues with natural gas. I see gas becoming a bigger problem for the US and Canada (due to legal requirements to export to the US) far sooner than oil does. The main reason being the buying power the US commands on the world market for oil cannot be applied to gas.

Natural gas is a whole different ball of wax.  It's not easily shipped.  And we've become very dependent on it.  Partly because environmental regulations encourage its use, partly because the oil crisis of the '70s discouraged the use of oil to generate electricity, partly because it has been so cheap and so plentiful for so long.  

We've come close to running out of natural gas before.  That is, using so much that the pressure drops to null, meaning no gas flows through the pipeline.  And that was with relatively mild summers and winters.  In the winter of 2004, areas in the northeast were warned that rolling blackouts might be necessary - during one of the bitterest cold snaps of the year.  (Of course.  Just as energy crisis hit on hot days in summer, they're more likely on cold days in winter.)  

We've been lucky the past four or five years.  Our luck may have run out this year.  A hot summer plus those hurricanes...even if the winter isn't too bad, we could be in trouble this year.