IATA head says fuel cost may put some airlines in trouble. According to the Wall Street Journal, Giovanni Bisignani of IATA said continued rises in oil prices could put some airlines in serious jeopardy as surcharges and fare hikes will never be enough to cover spikes in operational costs. IATA estimates the airline industry’s fuel bill grew to $63 billion in 2004, from $43 billion in 2003. Bisignani also said, if the average price of Brent fuel for this year is $43 per barrel, the bill will further increase to $76 billion in 2005.

Its the begining of the end... Predictions are for 100$+/barrel within 2 years...

Also predictions of fuel going back down to the 30$/barrel mark. So pretty much, no one knows.

peak oil coming soon, collapse of economy etc. better brush up on your subsistence gardening skills.

I think the accurate term to describe the "peak" you talked about is "Hubbard's Peak." It's where more than 50% of all the oil in the world has been extracted and the remaining 50% of oil is either very difficult and/or too costly to extract - driving the oil price through the roof.

Maybe someone living in Europe can answer this for me. Why is it that to fill a compact car in North America will cost me $40, meanwhile, doing the same thing in Europe will easily cost me more than $100? If I had to guess it, I would say that maybe the reason is due to North America being one of the oil producing regions (e.g Alberta, Texas) !??! Or is it, European countries' tax on gas is outrageous?

First of all oil prices hit a low of $49 a barrel today, supposedly the lowest since February.

Norway, one of the top exporters of oil in world have been seeing gas prices of around $2 per litre for nearly 15 years now.

here was some good news about oil futures

May 12 (Bloomberg) -- Canadian stocks dropped, paced by energy producers such as EnCana Corp. and Suncor Energy Inc. as oil prices tumbled below $49 a barrel.

``The markets got ahead of themselves in the energy sector and now you are going to see the pullback,'' said Doug Davis, president of Davis-Rea Ltd. Investment, which manages C$370 million in Toronto. ``We could see oil prices come back to around $40 a barrel.''

Now that would be nice.

The drop in the barrel price will be masked by the drop in the Canadian dollar as opposed to the greenback.

CAD dropped 6.4% since December 17th.