The company that called bullshit on Enron, as Salon puts it, is now predicting which global energy companies will see their oil production hit a historical peak before beginning an irreversible decline.

An excerpt from the Salon article (subscription or day pass required):

March 15, 2005  | ... On Feb. 21, 2001, three Herold analysts issued a report that said Enron's profit margins were shriveling, the company had too few hard assets, and its stock price was way too high. Less than ten months later, Enron filed for bankruptcy.

Today, the analysts at Herold -- a research-only firm that issues valuations on several hundred publicly traded energy companies -- are making predictions even bolder than their call on Enron. They have begun estimating when each of the world's biggest energy companies will peak in its ability to produce oil and gas. Herold's work shows that the best minds in the energy industry are accepting the reality that the globe is reaching (or has already reached) the limit of its own ability to produce ever increasing amounts of oil.

Many analysts have estimated when the earth will reach its peak oil production. Others have done estimates on when individual countries will hit their peaks. Herold is the first Wall Street firm to predict when specific energy companies will hit their peaks.

Since last fall, Herold has done peak estimates on about two dozen oil companies. Herold believes that the French oil company, Total S.A., will reach its peak production in 2007. Herold expects 2008 to be critical, with Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips Co., BP, Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and the Italian producer, Eni S.p.A., all hitting their peaks. In 2009, Herold expects ChevronTexaco Corp. to peak. In Herold's view, each of the world's seven largest publicly traded oil companies will begin seeing production declines within the next 48 months or so.

For more on this, see my blog posting The End of Suburbia, or, for a more sweeping look, The inauguration, the coming wars AND the end of suburbia.

Addendum:

A Feb. 18 Richard Gwyn column from the Toronto Star, Learning to live within our limits, defends the Kyoto Accord thusly:

Those who criticize Kyoto for accomplishing little at considerable cost, in cash and in reduced economic efficiency, thus have a point. But it's beside the real point of the exercise. Kyoto will justify itself if it speeds up our understanding of our relationship to our planet far more than by whether it slows down global warming. ...

The start of the problem is population increase. The consequences are not just that we consume more overall but that we reduce the Earth's productivity, through, for example, deforestation and desertification. The real problem is that our consumption is going to soar even if our population increase slows, as it is actually now doing.

The cause here is globalization. It is, despite its critics, working. It's making most people richer (if some others poorer). The wealthier we become, the more we consume.

In 50 years, China will probably have the world's largest single economy. By then, India will be in the top five. Just these two countries alone account for one-third of the world's population. Behind them, a lengthening list of now underdeveloped countries will be racing up the economic ladder.

A great many of the Earth's people thus are becoming like Americans. Combine all these coming "neo-Americans" in China and India and elsewhere and you've got the consumption demand of a second Earth.

Even our single Earth is already reaching its limits. By 2010 to 2015, one half of all the known reserves of conventional oil will have been consumed. One half of the world's fish stocks is now fully exploited and one in five is over-exploited.

Gwyn concludes we can either learn to live with earth's limits or look forward to a very Hobbesian future.