The difference between the past decade’s oil-price trend and this decade’s is the effect of new political sophistication, reservoir decline rates and practical peak oil, Tom Petrie, vice chairman of Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., told Houston Producers Forum members recently. These types of price drivers haven’t been seen before.

New political and economic sophistication in countries like China and India are having an effect on oil demand, and thus on price. Communism and socialism haven given way to forms of state capitalism in Russia, China and India. “One third of the world’s population, previously under systemic impoverishment, is quite clearly in a different mode today,” said Petrie.

Another driver is the advent of conventional-resource maturity. Decline rates are increasing in the Middle East, Latin America and Mexico, as well as other countries. There is a need to put new capital to work in evermore challenging environments, he said.

Also not seen before is the level of emerging resource nationalism in the world’s oil-endowed countries, an effect particularly epitomized in Russian energy strategies.

“The recapturing of resource potential in events such as Shell and Sakhalin II, BP Plc and TNK-BP and the Yukos situation is reflective of Russian policy-makers’ sense that the easy gains have already been made.”

Petrie said a period of practical peak oil is imminent. “There is a debate about this. On one end, ExxonMobil says there is 120 million barrels a day of possible new production. There are others who say that peak oil occurred last year or the year before and it is all downhill from here.”

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