Fears emerge over Russia’s oil output

clipped from www.ft.com Russian oil production has peaked and may never return to current levels, one of the country’s top energy executives has warned, fuelling concerns that the world’s biggest oil producers cannot keep up with rampant Asian demand. The warning helped on Tuesday to push crude oil prices to a fresh all-time high above $112 a barrel, threatening to stoke inflation in many countries. Leonid Fedun, the 52-year-old vice-president of Lukoil, Russia’s largest independent oil company, told the Financial Times he believed last year’s Russian oil production of about 10m barrels a day was the highest he would see “in his lifetime”. Russia is the world’s second biggest oil producer. Mr Fedun compared Russia with the North Sea and Mexico, where oil production is declining dramatically The trend, however, has turned, with supply dropping below year-ago levels for the first time this decade, according to the International Energy Agency, the energy watchdog.