The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, known in the oil business as CIBC, has said that by 2012 “suppliers to the United States are poised to cut their global exports by nearly 2 million barrels a day”.

The resulting pressure on price, the bank said, would shift focus to the oil sands.

The projected seven-percent cut to the U.S. supply would come from countries having to balance their own domestic demand with the need for royalties: Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Algeria and Russia.

“Soaring domestic demand is cannibalizing export capacity, and will increasingly do so as productions plateaus or declines in many of these countries,” chief CIBC economist, Jeff Rubin said in a statement.

Last year, Opec members plus Russia and Mexico, consumed over 12 MM bpd, or 60 percent more than China and slightly more than all of Western Europe, Rubin added.

Demand in the new producer countries was being fuelled by subsidies that in some cases reduced a barrel of oil to “between $10 and $20”. Russia is now the world's largest oil producer, but Russian demand “is growing at about twice the pace of production, and is claiming all of the country's production gains.”

In Mexico, rapid decline at the Cantarell field means export capacity is “lethally challenged” and could become “insignificant” by 2012.

“For multinational oil firms, the world is rapidly shrinking,” he said, adding, “Increasingly they are shut out of the backyards of all the state-owned oil patches and then have to bid against those state firms in places still open for investment.”

Canada, on the other hand, is “one of those few places” where government has not felt the need to own the oil patch.

Rubin’s address was heard at a CIBC World Markets Industrial Conference of companies and investors. ws@scandoil.com