Maybe if they’d known this before hauling the oil executives up to Capitol Hill last week, they might not have made as many fatuous statements as they did. Then again, who am I kidding?

For all the attention paid to China’s increasing energy thirst, rising energy demand in the Middle East may pose the greater challenge. Last year, the region’s six largest petroleum exporters — Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Kuwait, Iraq and Qatar — curbed their output by 544,000 barrels a day. At the same time, their domestic demand increased by 318,000 barrels a day, leading to a loss in net exports of 862,000 barrels a day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Demand in the Middle East is a major factor right now, said Adam Robinson, an oil analyst at Lehman Brothers in New York. Mr. Robinson predicts the region will constitute more than 40% of increased demand next year.

Now that I think about it, maybe we should conceal the rising usage/falling exports within OPEC nations from members of Congress. It’ll just make them more inclined to follow through on the notion of suing OPEC.

The unstated assumption would go something like this: The nerve of those countries, using more of the product that lies under their soil, when everyone knows we have the right to buy as much as we want at a price of our choosing so we don’t have to drill off our own coasts. (Yes, I know they subsidize, and we all know that’s foolish. What do you want to do about it?)

Oh, and there’s this cheery sentence buried in the article: “Mexican officials announced Monday that output from the country’s once-mighty offshore Cantarell field had plunged by a third in less than a year.”

Someone call a priest to administer last rites to Cantarell. Then call a bookie to place bets on the year when Mexico ceases exporting oil, like Indonesia, which acknowledged its status this week by announcing it will pull out of OPEC at year’s end.

Source: Oil Exports Down

Crude prices jumped on Monday in electronic trading as news of the attack broke, but analysts said the impact on prices spilled over into Tuesday, when exchanges on both side of the Atlantic re-opened after the long weekend.

“Is it demand? Is it speculation? Is it OPEC punishing George Bush for the war in Iraq?” asks Dan Denning in The Daily Reckoning Australia. “OPEC thinks there’s plenty of oil. It’s the declining U.S. dollar that’s to blame. OPEC says that for every one percent decline in the dollar oil rises by US$4, and vice versa.

“The solution to high oil prices, then, is not increased supply or reduced demand, but a stronger U.S. dollar! Well, there is certainly some truth to that, but it is not likely to happen any time soon. As a tangible good whose supply cannot be increased by a central banker, the oil price (a little like the gold price) tells you there’s too much paper money chasing too little stuff.”

Alexander Green in Investment U has identified a new, highly profitable oil source: “Alberta’s oil sands are the largest known reserve of oil on earth, containing between 1.7 and 2.5 trillion barrels. (Saudi Arabia, by comparison, has only 262 billion barrels of proven reserves. In fact, all OPEC nations combined have less than 900 billion barrels.) For decades, these sands weren’t even considered part of the world’s oil reserves because the oil there wasn’t economically extractible at prevailing prices using then-current technology.

“But times have changed… And the new gold rush is on.

“In Alberta’s oil sands, energy companies don’t drill for oil. They dig it up. After excavation, giant trucks three stories high – carrying up to 400 tons of oil sands – carry it off to a processing plant.”

Read on here to find out how to cash in on the tar-sands “black gold” rush with this oil mining company.