Commodity Markets Waking to Resource Depletion  

WorldChanging notes that commodity (particularly energy) prices are soaring due to resource depletion.

I think this is due to a combination of factors - consumption growth (driven largely by China), industry consolidation (with a lot of mergers amongst big miners and oil companies in recent years, they have regained a lot of pricing power) and infrastructure bottlenecks (in Australia at least, we simply can't ship the stuff out fast enough to meet demand) would really seem to be the main drivers.

Resource depletion would seem to be any issue in only limited areas at this point - specifically oil and natural gas. And even in these cases, some of the constraints may still be structural - for an example, a Goldman Sachs report I read recently noted that the mix of crude oil being pumped has a greater proprotion of heavy, sour crude than used to be the case. The refineries that can process this type of oil are apparently working at full capacity, and new refineries are not coming on stream (or being converted) fast enough to handle the increased volume available. They even speculated that OPEC would have to cut back on production of heavy oil as storage tanks were filling up the stuff and there was going to be nowhere to put it.

Bloomberg reports that even financiers and hedge-fund analysts are waking up to resource scarcity: "Commodity prices surged to a 24-year high, led by gains in copper and crude oil, on concern that global economic growth is eroding inventories of raw materials faster than supplies can be replenished." And speaking about oil prices they quote a Citigroup analyst who said "OPEC is pretty powerless to lower prices. If OPEC boosts output the bulls will say that there will be less spare capacity."