A major disruption in the oil supply would do it, says Bryce.

Question: What will it take to trigger an oil crisis?

Robert Bryce: Well, I mean the results are obvious so can be easily be predicted which is huge spike in the price. Any kind of an oil interruption there is of a major scale would have an immediate impact on price on may be a doubling or even kept potentially even a tripling depending on how long it lasted. Whether of answer obviously one hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico we have seen with hurricane Katrina, what happened there the it is called the Loop to Luciana off shore operating pipe line or some thing that is big oil receiving terminal off shore in the Gulf of Mexico that receives a lot of foreign oil tankers, if that were to be here at damage by a  hurricane that would have a huge impact. Tornadoes on the major refinery the Baytown Refinery in Texas is operated by Exxon Mobiles, is the biggest refinery in US, 500,000 barrels a day, if you are hit by a tornado or a hurricane it would have a huge impact. So I could name you a whole bunch, [inaudible] in Nigeria, [inaudible] in Venezuela, [inaudible] in Saudi Arabia, terrorist attack on abcake [phonetic] the big Saudi gas oil separation plant that provides about 8% or 9% of global oil production, I could give you a long list.

Date Recorded: 03/20/2008