My only other explanation would be that while China is using more SOMEONE else has to be using less. Which countries are SOMEONE?

all four regions are showing exponential increase in domestic consumption

According to EIA, US domestic oil consumption growth was slightly negative last year, though it is rebounding this year.

1.) Poor Countries.
2.) General Economic slow down or recession.
3.) Low grade products of the oil industry bunker fuel/Asphalt/fuel oil for generators.

All of these can be looked at to discern trends in oil usage.
The key factor will in my opinion real shortages of oil or oil based products.

We are seeing shortages/demand destruction in both poor countries and worldwide for asphalt. The bunker fuel market is very very tight with any hiccup resulting in shortages.

China's oil imports in September of 2006 were 24% more than  September 2005, and 2.4% more than the previous record set in  the middle of January. As recently as 1992  China  was self-sufficient in oil. Today the country imports 40% of  its needs, and imports continue to increase each year. 

China  has begun to fill its new strategic petroleum reserve - the  first time the country has established such a reserve. While  details as to the fill rate and capacities are not disclosed,  the size of the strategic reserves are intended to provide for  120 days of demand should oil supplies be interrupted. 

China  will pass  Japan  as the world's second-largest vehicle market this year. Carmakers  in  China  sold 5.76 million units this year through October, an increase  of 25.6% from a year earlier. Both production and sales for  2006 are expected to top seven million units, which would set  a new record and would exceed last year's production by over  a million autos.

Daqing,  the largest oilfield in  China, is in decline.  China  depends on this field for one-quarter of its oil production.  In 2010 it is projected the field will produce 780,000 barrels  per day, down from 1.1 million barrels per day in 1997. New  discoveries in  China  are not keeping pace with the skyrocketing demand for oil and  oil products.

The  chief executive of Mexico state oil monopoly Pemex last month  said production at its Cantarell oil field - one of the top  three producing fields in the world - will decline by an  average of 14 percent a year starting next year. The average  annual decline will be equivalent to about 150,000 barrels a  day.  Cantarell, Mexico's largest source of crude oil, began declining from producing  a record 2.1 million barrels a day in 2004 to roughly 1.8  million barrels a day this year.

All my first hand interactions wtih mainland Chinese, including a former girlfriend, lead me to believe that any portrayal of lifestyles of common Chinese being similar to the average American are just wrong.

Given the population of China, it would be easy to find 10 or 20 million Chinese who indeed live (materially) in a fashion with which Americans could identify, but that would only be 1 or 2% of the entire Chinese population!

There is a real disconnect between perceptions (by North Americans) of what the East is like, and the reality on the ground.    Even the average Japanese, South Korean, or Taiwanese live physically more modest lives than the average citizen of the US or Canada.

Can't you just allow people a little freedom of choice, instead of using USA as a measure of prosperity? I can only imagine if you ask people in Sweden or Netherlands "do you want to live like the US" what the answer would be. On what basis should China be trying to "imitate" USA, and not Netherlands for example? I think that people in China simply want to live better, like all normal human beings. They are finding their own ways and IMO some of their ways are better than US - at least they are not building endless suburbs.

P.S. I apologize if the similarity you were finding was based on the "stuff" you saw in the houses... Most likely this is because it is produced in the same factories :)

While China, like Canada, is a vast land, its wealth is unevenly distributed.  While Canada has its population spread along the border within 150 miles of the US, China's prosperity looks like a T-bone, spread along the east coast and up the Yangtze.

I too have talked to the "common people."  I have talked to an old man in western China who shares a 12x12 room with his sister and mother, the only decoration on the wall a cross, the toilet a slit in a concrete block over a cess pool out in the elements.

I've talked with two old pensioned off, maimed and crippled veterans of Mao's '50s campain who live together in a tiny dark hovel with no electricity.

I've seen wheat spread across the road so that passing feet, bicycles, and scooters will seperate the chafe before milling by the baker who will use it to make noodles.

I've walked gingerly across mothers and babies sleeping on the floor of a train late at night and experienced the deep embarrassment of being forced to take the seat of an unfortunate soul because others wanted to talk to me, the only westerner many of them had ever seen in person.

I've chatted with a Chinese-Tibetan munk, in the small room which he shares with two young acolytes, a single bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling the only acknowledgement of modernism; it won't be missed.

On horseback, I've greeted a man riding his horse on a narrow muddy mountain trail, his three wives and a dozen or more children walking behind, all wearing traditional costume, the nearest electrical outlet miles away in the valley.  

I've seen the ecological and cultural destruction and human displacement due to the Three Gorges Dam. The last remnants of human occupation before the flood looking strangely Orwellian.  Perhaps all for naught as the Yangtze is weakening, due perhaps to global climate change.

I've seen the shanty towns, completely off the grid, along the railroad right of way on the outskirts of Beijing and other large cities. They tend their gardens and trade amongst themselves.  Many of these people come from the country in the off season looking for work in factories.  Some never return to the country.

And I've seen the mass destruction of the hutongs in Beijing, ancient villages of narrow winding streets, and its associated way of life in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, simply because they are a "national embarrassment."

Shanghai looks like a strange cross between Las Vegas and NYC, complete with eight lane highways. But even there you can still find small, if disappearing, pockets of the old lifestyle, the hutongs.  They will pass into history soon.

Beijing is sprouting western style suburbs of McMansions and has a growing obesity problem that is virtually absent in western China where the bicycle still reigns supreme.

It is interesting that some segments of Chinese society want to be just like us in the "west."  They seem to admire everything we say and do. They dream of wealth. In Beijing there isn't a single western popular book or magazine that isn't available in Chinese. Not to mention KFC, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Hard Rock Cafe, and Starbucks. How did it come to pass that a "communist" nation is willing to pay US$6.00 for a latte when so much of the population earns less than $1.00 a day.

If peak oil threatens western civilization, it will surely devastate the east coast of China.  They, too, live in a technological trap.  But a significant portion of China still lives in centuries past and may hardly notice the passing of western civilization. They may die of thirst thanks to dying rivers and bungled irrigation projects, but they won't starve.  They know how to live off the grid. Many of them have never experienced the grid.

I have not seen the Discovery Channel segments you mention. But it is a shame that the Discovery Channel may have dedicated five segments to people who are becoming just like us.  It is the people who are not just like us whom we need to discover and talk to if we are to learn how to live with the consequences of peak oil.

John McFadden
Ottawa, Ontario

And yes, attributing all this demand to cars is yet another instance of transference of the context of what one knows to what one doesn't know. Transportation of all kinds in China accounts for only 36% of oil consumption, and personal cars (there are many non-personal cars) for only a few percent (it was 3% in 2003--it's probably closer to 5 or 6% now).

China's growth is almost entirely export-led. It depends on other nations buying the stuff that China makes for export.

This has worked because other nations are happy to export jobs and import stuff. At least until the next inevitable recession, or worse, depression.

What happens to China's growth when this occurs?
Simple. It stops. They have not matured an internal market yet, so they are just as much at risk as the US and Western developed nations are from a recession. The upside of globalisation is cheap barbeque sets and patio furniture and ipods. The downside is everybody gets burnt.

Dont worry about China.(Or should that be Worry about China?) She came to the oil party last, and all the best wine has already been drunk. She may have a booming economy now, but woe betide the day when it collapses and 500 million upper and middle class Chinese realise they are not going to make it to a Californian  lifestyle after all. They will be pretty pissed off, argumentative and equipped with the organisational skills to mobilise the masses. It may take more than a cultural revolution this time.

Remember: It was the middle classes that fomented revolution in France, Europe in 1848 and Czarist Russia.
And look at the collapse of the Hohenzollerns in 1918: sure military set backs had a lot to do with it, but eating sawdust and turnip bread had a fair amount to do with it. Add Spanish flu (soon to be Avian Flu?)in to the mix and Empires can collapse.

In short, China just might not make it in time

Does history repeate itself? or does it just rhyme?

Russia's economy was, ironically, saved by the 1998 rouble collapse and debt default.  It revived domestic producers who couldn't compete with the flood of imports.  The 10% GDP increase in 2000 contradicts the oil revenue "theory" and shows it for the pile of steaming crap that it is.  Also, it is only in the last two years that the Russian government has succeeded in applying the law and stopped the funneling of oil revenues into offshore banks.  Instead of having a net outflow of over 24 billion US every year the country now has a net inflow of more than 20 billion US.

Russia is a case study in the failure of monetarist economic theory.  It opened itself up to free trade when its domestic industry was weak and unprepared for foreign competition and it payed the price.  Japan, USA, UK and all of the other leading world economies were all protectionist when they were developing.  After 1998, the currency devaluation in Russia imposed a de facto protectionist barrier on imports.  The oil price helped after 2002 but cannot account for the recovery that started by the middle of 1999.  Industrial growth was 12% for 1999.

The "demand" figures you see reported in the meantime are all derived, either as "apparent consumption" (crude production + net oil imports) or "apparent demand" (refinery runs + net product imports).

This is not an open thread.  Posts such as yours should go in the open threads (DrumBeats).  

Indeed, the article you posted was already posted today (by me).  There was already a fairly long discussion of it in today's DrumBeat.  

And, I guess, if our parents didn't die from dirty towels, neither will we. Inconvenience is more defined by upbringing than by absolutes relating to survival.

As Borat would say,"Wawaweeweh!"

The mysterious they. Your spooky bosses. You're going to dump me, aren't you. C'mon, let's go have lunch. Talk about it. Red flag. Classified. Starting to rhyme. Can never spell ryhmne.