OPEC will be holding its meeting on oil production in Vienna, Austria on October 24.

I have not been able to locate a schedule, but the OPEC Meeting Website indicates that there will be live streaming of some events--press conferences, interviews, and opening events. This is described at this location. It is virtually certain that the meeting itself will not be on the webcast.

The website gives a form for people to submit questions to possibly be asked of senior OPEC officials at press conferences.

I am posting this information in advance, since the meeting starts while those of us in the United States are still sleeping. Some of you in other parts of the world may want to tune in to the webcast.

Below the fold you will find a few quotes I have noticed preceding the conference. It sounds to me like there are several hard-liners who want big cuts and several others who are cautious about making cuts.

One of the classic ecological modeling problems is the oscillating populations of predators and their prey in an ecosystem--as prey population rises, predator population follows suit until prey population begins to fall off, resulting in a subsequent drop in predator population (illustrated below). The same dynamic also applies, to some degree, to the relationship between oil price (prey) and marginal production/demand destruction/energy policy (predator). This post will explore that relationship and its ability to help us avoid poor energy policy choices.

Yesterday, August 6, the EIA published new International Petroleum Monthly data. The new data revised downward previously published estimates, all the way back to 2002, with the biggest revisions in 2007 and 2008. With the revisions, the latest month, May 2008, shows new record-high oil production. Other recent months which had previously set records are now 67,000 barrels per day to 417,000 barrels per day lower than reported just a month ago. In this post, I offer a few thoughts on what the new data suggests.

I actually started on this post about a year ago, and forgot about it until recently. Here I provide 2007 numbers on the sources for oil and gasoline imports into the U.S., courtesy of the Energy Information Administration.

For 2007, the Top 10 exporters of finished gasoline to the U.S. in million barrels were: