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Mexico, the second-biggest exporter to the United States, seems increasingly helpless to find new supplies to offset the collapse of its largest oil field, Cantarell. A combination of falling production and rising domestic consumption could wipe out Mexico’s exports within five years.
Foreign investment could help Mexico produce oil from deeper waters, but that is a controversial proposition in a country where oil has long been seen as part of the national patrimony.
Another country, Russia, is also a focus of analysts’ worries. Russia is not exactly running out of places to look for oil — a huge chunk of eastern Siberia remains unexplored — and the country has been the biggest contributor to the growth in energy supplies in the last decade.
But Russian energy officials warned recently that the days of stunning growth that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union were over, as the country focuses on stabilizing its output. Russia today produces about 10 million barrels of oil a day, up from a low of 6 million barrels in 1996.
The Russian government has been muscling Western companies to gain more control over its energy resources. That rise in energy nationalism could freeze new investment and slow any meaningful growth in supplies there for years.
As countries like Russia slow output, analysts say OPEC will have to pick up the slack. The oil cartel accounts for 40 percent of the world’s oil exports and owns more than 75 percent of global reserves. But there are serious concerns that OPEC will also find it tough to increase production.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, is completing a $50 billion plan to increase capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day, but it signaled recently that it would not go beyond that. That means Saudi Arabia could fall short of the 15 million barrels a day that most experts had expected it to produce in the long run.
OPEC’s 13 members plan to spend $150 billion to expand their capacity by five million barrels a day by 2012. But OPEC will need to pump 60 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 36 million barrels a day today, to meet the projected growth in demand. Analysts say that without Iran and Iraq — where nearly 30 years of wars and sanctions have crippled oil production — reaching that level will be impossible.
Not everyone is pessimistic about energy supplies. A study by the National Petroleum Council, an industry group that provides advice to the secretary of energy, concluded that the world still had plenty of petroleum resources that could be tapped.
In fact, high prices have set off a global dash for oil. Brazil, for example, has struck large offshore fields that could turn the country into one of the world’s top 10 producers. But developing new fields can take many years.
To make up the shortfall, the world is also increasingly turning to fuels from unconventional sources, like biofuels or heavy oil. Canadian tar sands, for example, have attracted large investments.
But the International Energy Agency estimates that current investments will be insufficient to replace declining oil production. The energy agency said it would take $5.4 trillion by 2030 to raise global output. Otherwise, it warned that a crisis before 2015 involving “an abrupt run-up in prices” could not be ruled out.
