by Walden Bello

Speech delivered during the Development RoundTable Series Forum on Oil and Electric Power held at the Sulo Hotel on 17 June 2008

Our dependency on oil has never been more excruciating than it is today.   The price of fuel has reached unheard of heights.  The price of crude went above $139 a barrel over a week ago, before easing.  At the pump, the price of unleaded gasoline has gone beyond P56 and diesel above P49.  We are now consuming over 120 million barrels a year, and 90 per cent of that is sourced outside the country.

What is causing this unprecedented rise in global oil prices?  The key factor seems to be that the demand for oil is rising much faster than its supply, and this is due fundamentally  to the fact that the few old oilfields on which the world relies for most of its oil are being depleted and no new fields have been discovered that can match their production and reserves.  Peak oil, which was viewed just a few years ago as a outlandish theory, is now being treated as fact.  The second factor pushing up prices is the rush to buy oil futures contracts, a development that is partly determined by the fear that available oil will increasingly become scarce, partly by the desire of investors to park their wealth in oil instead of the declining dollar.

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