Thursday, December 5, 2013

Oil demand to rise rapidly in China, India

They[Different commodities] move in general in the similar direction but maybe at different times. Now, say if the price of corn goes up substantially, the farmers can right away increase the production of corn and a year later the additional supplies will then essentially contain further price increase and the price will go down. 

In the case of the oil industry and also for copper, once you have shortages developing, until new large reserves come on stream and until new mines essentially produce, the response time is very long and we have essentially in the world, coming from emerging economies – those would be China and India – very rapidly rising oil demands.

In China over the last fifteen years, oil imports, they have risen three times. China consumes now almost ten million barrels of oil a day. So the demand is there, if they slow down somewhat, long-term it’s there. Every oil well eventually runs dry. It cannot produce forever. New oil is very costly to produce. In other words you have to go and drill and you have to then extract the oil and there’s a lot of safety regulations and very costly, probably around eighty Dollars a barrel. 

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