But it is oil that gets most of the attention. Prices around $60 a barrel, driven by high demand growth, are fueling the fear of imminent shortage - that the world is going to begin running out of oil in five or 10 years.
This shortage, it is argued, will be amplified by the substantial and growing demand from two giants: China and India.
Yet this fear is not borne out by the fundamentals of supply. Our new, field-by-field analysis of production capacity, led by my colleagues Peter Jackson and Robert Esser, is quite at odds with the current view and leads to a strikingly different conclusion:
There will be a large, unprecedented buildup of oil supply in the next few years. Between 2004 and 2010, capacity to produce oil (not actual production) could grow by 16 million barrels a day - from 85 million barrels per day to 101 million barrels a day - a 20 percent increase.
Such growth over the next few years would relieve the current pressure on supply and demand.
Where will this growth come from? It is pretty evenly divided between non-OPEC and OPEC.
The largest non-OPEC growth is projected for Canada, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Azerbaijan, Angola and Russia. In the OPEC countries, significant growth is expected to occur in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Algeria and Libya, among others.
"This is the big gorilla. The demand by China and India together, if they continue to grow, it is quite substantial and it is frightening," said Mazen I. Snobar, President and CEO of Aramco Services Co., which delivers Saudi oil to the United States.
All oil producing nations will have to chip in to meet the needs if demand in those two countries continues to rise, said Snobar, adding, "Let's hope they don't sustain this growth."
Snobar, who is based in Houston, gave his assessment of the Asia oil demands during an energy forum attended by 200 leaders from the petroleum industry, government and academia at Southern Methodist University.
Of the United States, he said the country "cannot realistically expect to be energy independent. The forces that drive our industry are directly linked to the health of the economy here and worldwide, and we must have the stability to keep things in balance," he said.
