An articulated lorry was driven for a period of one year with a boat tail (of varying length) and one year without a boat tail. The improved aerodynamics, depending on the length of the boat tail, resulted in reduced fuel consumption (and emissions!) of up to 7.5 percent. The optimum boat tail length proved to be two metres. "

And industry insiders say motorists should also expect shortages of unleaded petrol in the period leading up to Christmas.

But oil has permeated more of our lives than most people realize. Here, the most surprising places you'll find oil, in some form, as a key ingredient: "

Here in the UK like most of Europe that number is 6. In North America and Australia it’s 3, in China and India 30, and in the less touristy parts of Africa it’s something over a thousand. "

These Laws are believed to hold rigorously. "

While many make fun of economists--saying that if all the economists in the world were strung end to end around the globe, they would fail to reach a conclusion-- the same might be true for those predicting the direction of oil prices.

Executive Summary: The fevered frenzy of Industrial Civilization’s resource consumption appears to have finally reached its apex and begun its decline in this, the first decade of the twenty-first century. A closer look at the physical realities of resource extraction reveals that the resource situation is, in fact, terminal for our high-consumin’ civilization. Resource depletion is a predicament requiring adaptation to an entirely new low-consumption paradigm, rather than a problem to be solved with technological or social solutions. As a country, we need to start the conversation about what a lower-consumption, resource-poor society would look like, and begin the appropriate preparations."

The forecast of slower growth in oil demand puts the IEA increasingly in a camp of contrarians bucking the popular view that crude demand will grow briskly in a postrecession world. That view holds that long-term demand will grow at a fast clip because of rising emerging-market wealth and consumption in places like China and India.

The Briefs

First, oil reserves are finite. This is incontrovertible. But even so, no one knows how finite they are. And since we don't know the total amount of oil resources existing underground, it's impossible to calculate the curve of future supply.

"Global gas markets have evolved from a seller's market, driven by tight supply and demand, to a buyer's market as demand weakens while new supply comes onstream," the IEA says in a draft report of it World Energy Outlook, to be published November 10, according to the FT.

Efforts to better manage expanding oil demand in the developed world have been more effective than first expected, the paper quoted a person familiar with the report as saying. It did not give any estimates on how deep the cut might be.

“The forecasts are always wrong,” he has told Reuters. “Why do you carry on running them?”

While oil has risen, the U.S. currency has weakened, leading to speculation that the dollar’s depreciation is driving investors to buy oil as an inflation hedge, thereby pushing up the price of crude.

The IEA is set to revise its long-term oil demand forecasts - for 2030 - downwards again this year, according to the Wall Street Journal. Citing a person ‘familiar’ with the forecast, the WSJ story doesn’t give an number, but hints at two reasons: first quoting the source as referring to “demand-management policies” having a bigger than expected effect, and the drop in industrial production is apparently also a “big factor”.