So the major obstacle to the development of new supplies is not geology but what happens above ground: international affairs, politics, investment and technology.
The other are the strategic, so-called strategic stocks that the United States and the other Western industrial countries have, which could put in as much as four million barrels a day of oil into the market pretty quickly.
The Russians are turning east to the Chinese - to the Europeans' surprise. It always seemed to me that the relationship between Russia and China would shift from being based in Marx and Lenin to being based in oil and gas.
This has a lot to do with the unrest in Nigeria, but also with the production loss after the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, the decline in Iraq since the 2003 war, and the decline in Venezuelan output since 2002.
We are living in a different world now. You can see it everywhere in international relations: It was noteworthy that, after his visit to Washington, the Chinese president's next stop was Saudi Arabia.
