Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 2008

The Future of Energy

(Published in BusinessWorld under the View from Taft column, January 24, 2008) At the crack of the New Year, after much of the holiday jubilations, we were all greeted by the alarming newspaper headlines which read “world oil price hits $100 a barrel”. The price of oil has more than doubled over the last 12 months, and has been vacillating to near $100-a-barrel in November last year. Although oil price is back to the 90-dollar-a-barrel levels nowadays, there is still much uncertainty on the future of this precious commodity and the future of energy in general is still uncertain because oil resources are fast being depleted. According to the Energy Information Agency (EIA) of the U.S. government, world demand for oil is expected to increase by 54% in the first 25 years of the 21st century. About 40%, will come from Asia, mainly because of China and India because of their rapidly growing economies But the supply cannot meet oil demand forever. The EIA predicts that the world will hit pea