A few days ago, I gave a presentation in Poland that talks about how much difficulty the world is having maintaining its oil production. The presentation was not set up to be a response to Jad Mouawad's recent New York Times article, Oil Industry Sets a Brisk Pace of New Discoveries, but in many ways it is one. Our recent discoveries really have not been enough to make up for our many production problems elsewhere. We are having problems not only with oil, but with natural gas. The solution the financially distressed world is increasingly considering is . . . well, read the story to see.

Changes in the oil market and climate change are generally seen as separate phenomena. Although it is common knowledge that fossil fuels are the predominant source of CO2 emissions, the interplay between these emissions and fossil fuel scarcity is a topic that has scarcely been researched.

A new report from ASPO Netherlands provides a focused view of the interplay between these two themes. The report indicates that while the peaking of oil production would by itself have a favorable impact on carbon dioxide emission, this beneficial effect may be mostly offset by increased emissions from unconventional oil production. The report can be downloaded here (PDF, 2.4 MB, 56 pp) and a summary can be found below the fold.

This is a guest post by Nawar Alsaadi. Nawar currently lives in Canada, but lived in Iraq until 1990. He still has close ties to the country, and has been following the situation closely there.

Investors and global oil companies such as Shell Petroleum, Eni, China National Petroleum, and Exxon Mobile betting on Iraq are certain to be disappointed.

Ever since the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, we have heard about the unlimited potential for the Iraqi oil. Often news reports mention that Iraq has the third largest oil reserves in the world, and that Iraq's oil ministry has a goal of producing 6 million barrels/day of oil over the medium term.

However, six years after the fall of Baghdad, the country is nowhere close to producing 6 million barrels a day. As a matter of fact, the country is still not producing at the same level it did before the war (2.2m bpd vs 2.5m bpd before the war). It is worth noting that the pre-war level was achieved despite years of war and crippling economic sanctions. Yet despite current access to capital and technology, the country could not yield better results than oil production under the Saddam regime in the midst of war and sanctions.

There are several reasons why Iraq has failed to rise to the occasion, and in this article I will attempt to address some of them:

• Endemic corruption
• Political reserves
• Bad management
• Political rivalry and foreign oil company stalemates
• Political insecurity

OPEC will meet on Sunday to talk about possibly reducing oil production further. In this post, I have a few short news clips, and some reader supplied analyses and graphs. Some of the graphs relate more to world oil production in total than just OPEC.

This is a graph provided by OPEC in its March report showing its estimate of both OPEC and World oil production through February:

According to OPEC's view, both OPEC and world production continued to drop through February.