Katie Martin

How far through these reserves are we getting and how dangerous is that?

It's kind of sloshing around the system.

Because we have, like, driving season in the States and because Europeans go on holiday on aeroplanes and, you know, and, and, and, and there's air con in Europe that suddenly needs to, like, really kick into gear.

I mean, look, this might be a stupid question, so tell me if it is, but the reserves that we have

It's not like a car, right?

You can drive your car until it literally runs out of petrol and then you can just point it down a hill and keep going.

I have actually.

It's a long story.

But is the same true of these sorts of reserves?

Can you run them down to zero or is there a level at which there's just not enough in the pipes?

Yeah, stock markets like lol, whatever.

I'm glad you called it squeaky bum time, because that's a phrase that I use quite a lot.

And Rob is pretty much convinced that I made it up.

I did not.

Anyway, so yeah, these stressed out people in energy markets are saying the world needs to wake up to this possibility that unless we get a really dramatic turnaround of the situation in the straight forward moves, then we're going to get towards the danger zone in these reserves.

I guess one thing here is that there are different ways of measuring the oil price, as you know well, Malcolm.

And one way that we do this is that there's what we call the spot price.

So there's the price that it costs to buy a barrel of oil today.

Pretty much that's what it means.

But then you can also arrange effectively to buy barrels of oil in future.