``Saudi Arabia has not joined the OPEC hawks, led by Venezuela and Iran, in calling for another supply cut, and we think we could be witnessing the beginning of the end for the organization,'' Neil McMahon, a London-based analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., wrote in a report today.

A barrel of oil hasn't been this cheap in 13 months — a rare silver lining for consumers amid a rapidly imploding financial landscape.

With the letters of credit needed to facilitate exports subject to rising interest rates, refineries are finding it hard to maximise the value of their production, the Paris-based International Energy Agency said in its monthly oil market report.

In a new report Friday, Deutsche Bank uses a number of interesting yard sticks to suggest crude is currently way too expensive and may fall to the $60 a barrel range as the economy worsens.

The escalating rise in demand and the dramatic spikes in oil price to almost $150 a barrel in July 2008, doubled the price from mid 2007. It seemed this was all a manifestation of peak oil playing out on the world stage of oil markets confronting rising demand producing dramatic oil scarcity.

As the financial crisis threatens to sink the global economy into recession, the question of China's future demand for oil, coal, copper and iron ore has taken on new importance for traders more accustomed to pricing in unstoppable growth.

The worldwide financial crisis, and the decline in available energy, mean that we may also have seen the final year of aggregate world economic growth.

The Department’s “Marine Highways” initiative calls for the selection and designation of key maritime inland and coastal maritime corridors as marine highways. These routes will be eligible for up to $25 million in existing federal capital construction funds. The communities involved will continue to qualify for up to $1.7 billion in federal highway congestion mitigation and air quality (CMAQ) funds.

In a monthly report, the agency, adviser to 28 industrialised countries, reduced its 2008 demand growth forecast by 250,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 440,000 bpd. This represents a 0.5 percent growth rate -- the lowest in percentage terms since 1993.

In his updated strategy, Mr. Rubin maintains a bullish outlook, arguing that the fundamentals that drove up oil during its remarkable run are still in place. Speculators may be gone, he said, but the marginal cost of a new barrel of oil is between $90 and $100. As well, the demand for oil has been driven mostly by developing economies, especially China, and not the G7, where economies are contracting and oil demand was stagnant even during good times.

"I'm concerned when I hear that the OPEC countries are meeting, or are about to meet, to discuss cutting production -- in other words, making the price potentially higher than it should be," Brown told reporters.

At the root of both is a common thread, deregulation, including open-ended permits to pollute the atmosphere and the oceans, little-regulated financial systems and economic globalisation, representing failure by governments to protect the life and welfare of their hapless populations.

Cap and trade has emerged as the dominant attempt to slow global warming. Global deals in permits to emit greenhouse gas emissions have hit nearly $65 billion a year. The European Union, under the Kyoto Protocol, has embraced cap and trade since 2005 and voluntary markets have developed in the United States, the developed world's top carbon polluter.

But the recent spike that sent petrol prices to $1.70 per litre is merely a taste of things to come. Indeed the CSIRO-led Future Fuels Forum predicted in July that petrol prices could reach $8 per litre within 10 years.

"I don't think we've seen anything that would suggest that oil prices are going to be so low that they are going to diminish interest in renewable energy," Bodman told reporters during a visit to the U.S. Agriculture Department to unveil a plan to better meet future demand for biofuels.