With any incremental demand improvement, there should be a pretty precipitous bounce.
Experts at the Houston office of McKinsey, a management consultancy, reckon that when such an incremental demand is added to the existing task of compensating for depletion, the result is equivalent to adding a whopping 65m barrels a day of oil production over the next two decades.
But with little likelihood that Berkeley's business would create much incremental demand for its products and no other apparent strategic upside for itself, Intel saw the investment as primarily a financial one.
"Incremental demand for commodities still largely comes from Asia.
"The incremental demand is increasingly going to be out of Asia," Mr. Flint said in an interview on Wednesday.
In the United States, oil supply had peaked early, and the incremental demand for energy had been satisfied by natural gas.
Like all really powerful business models, this one didn't just shift existing revenues among companies; it created new, incremental demand.
"The real question is, 'Will incremental demand from China, India and other places cause sustained higher commodity prices or is this just a cyclical upswing?"' said Michael Parker, fund manager for Mirador Diversified Fund in New York.
In a recent research note, Barclays Capital estimated that Japan would experience "incremental demand" increases of 143,000 barrels a day of fuel oil and 67,000 barrels a day of crude oil to replace lost nuclear and other power capacity.
One more statistic from the study is striking; the global energy industry needs to invest $33 trillion between now and 2035 to replace old sources of supply and to meet incremental demand.
But as Francisco Blanch of Merrill Lynch notes, most of the incremental demand for oil comes from China, India and the Middle East, where the prices of petrol and diesel are subsidised or capped, leaving drivers with little incentive to cut back.
