There are two edges triming American life styles.Not only will the volume of oil available to the market follow a dynamic of its own, declining faster than total production, but also that the number of exporting countries would diminish, compromising the diversity of supply.
Conventional oil production available for export according. Diamonds represent net exports from FSU, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, dots exports from the rest of the world. Arrows show forecast moments in time when producing countries cease exporting oil.New found wealth in exporting countries will foster higher consumption internally, leaving a shorter fraction of production available for export. Population in exporting countries tends to grow, along with consumption patterns (if not for everyone at least for some section of society) with access to technologies that provide a better quality of life but invariably consuming more energy (cars, homes, home appliances, air conditioning, etc). This is the basic dynamics behind the oil exports model.
Oil exporting countries will find little incentive to either try increase production or curb internal demand. Production and internal consumption run towards each other, rapidly swallowing exports.
There are two very interesting cases of countries that turned net importers just recently, the UK and Indonesia.
Although two markedly different countries in economic terms (one developed, another developing) both show similar patterns of internal consumption and production fast running to each other without any action taken to avoid the rendez-vous.Source: Oil Drum
