Are record oil and gasoline prices largely the fault of speculators, the falling dollar and the subprime mortgage crisis? Should the US open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and protected offshore areas to oil drilling? Is peak oil still a few years off, or are we in it right now?

If you largely get your news from the mainstream media you'll quickly get confused about what's happening with oil. And no wonder: the global economy and the global oil industry are two incredibly complex systems that do not exactly lend themselves to soundbite-style analysis.

As always, I highly recommend former CIA analyst Tom Whipple's weekly Peak Oil Review for an informed, apolitical view on what's going on behind the scenes of oil. In his last few Reviews, Whipple included a few quotes that I found neatly summarized the current situation (all the quotes below are from the Review unless otherwise notes) -- both because of what the quotes said and who said them:

Production and Peaking

• "Oil is no longer cheap; indeed, it has never been more expensive. Moreover, there is growing concern that the supply of oil may soon peak as consumption continues to grow, known supplies run out and new reserves become harder to find."
    -- From last week's The Economist (which has a whole section on energy)
• "Many people's supply-demand models for 2010 and beyond are out of balance. The futures market is sending a message to the physical market. Either you slow demand and increase supply or prices are going to go a lot higher."
    -- Adam Sieminski, chief energy economist, Deutsche Bank

Speculation and the weak dollar

• "Oil markets are driven by fundamentals. Our response to the notion that it is merely a bubble is that you are still seeing no supply growth. If the price isn't real, where is the supply?"
    -- Arjun Murti, Goldman Sachs
• "Market fundamentals show us that production has not kept pace with growing demand for oil, resulting in increasing prices and increasingly volatile prices... There is no evidence that we can find that speculators are driving futures prices [for oil]."
    -- U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman (quoted here)

Offshore and ANWR drilling

• "The projections in the OCS [outer continental shelf] access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030."
    -- US Energy Information Administration
• "...projected ANWR oil production constitutes between 0.4 and 1.2 percent of total world oil consumption in 2030, based on the low and high resource cases, respectively. Consequently, ANWR oil production is not projected to have a large impact on world oil prices."
    -- US Energy Information Administration (quoted here)

Natural gas

• "A few years ago people looked at L.N.G. [liquefied natural gas] as a solution to North America's gas needs. But today we see that there is less L.N.G. around than people expected, and there is more competition for that L.N.G. from markets that are willing to pay more than the United States."
    -- Nikos Tsafos, analyst with PFC Energy

And finally, here's brand new bit of worrisome news from CIBC World Markets:

• "A new forecast calls for gasoline prices to hit $7 (U.S.) a gallon in the next two years and oil to soar to $200 a barrel by 2010. The report by CIBC World Markets also predicts there will be 10 million fewer cars on the road in the United States by 2012."
    -- '$7-a-gallon gas, 10-million fewer cars: Rubin,' 26 June 2008, The Globe and Mail (Toronto).

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