The BP oil spill in the Gulf is all over the news these days. It is tough to not turn on the television and flick through stations that depict the ecological devastation and destruction.

Sadly it is likely to take years for this unmitigated disaster to be cleaned up. The long term social, ecological and economic effects will be horrendous.

Behind the surface of this fiasco lurk other issues and opportunities.

The US moratorium on offshore drilling may set the stage for a much higher oil prices in a few years time. The Gulf of Mexico (GOM) makes up approximately 25 percent of the world's deep/ultra deep offshore oil. In fact, more new oil was produced last year from fields in the US GOM than any other region in the world.

By placing a moratorium on deepwater drilling the naturally steep decline rates of deepwater oil wells will result in much lower production by 2011. Morgan Stanley estimates that if GOM drilling is permanently banned, production from the GOM would be virtually zero in a four- to five-year period.

Bernstein Research estimates if the moratorium remains in effect for a year it would cut global oil supplies by 500,000 barrels a day between 2013 and 2017.

The world is already out of "easy oil". Global oil discoveries peaked in 1960. The world is slowly starting to mirror the US in terms of production.

In the 1930's the US oil discoveries were at their highest. By the 1970's the US reached peak production and from then on had to continually import more and more oil. Things look even more worrisome when we look at the demand picture.

According to the US Energy Information Administration, demand for oil products is making a strong comeback. US demand for oil products is essentially back to early 2007 levels.

Lately the US has been approaching 20 million barrels per day, up roughly 10 percent from last spring's fairly depressed level of 18 million barrels per day. The IEA predicts that we will surpass 2007 global record consumption of 86.5 million barrels per day by the end of this year.

Now western economies may have actually hit a steady level of demand where oil usage may not grow much from here. In fact European fossil fuel demand has remained essentially constant since 1979.

But this has never really been the story. Asia has been the story.

According to the International Energy Agency, China is expected to consume 11 percent of global oil production this year and has accounted for 45 percent of the growth in global oil demand over the past decade.

This will be increasingly difficult if some of the largest sources for major oil discoveries are currently being placed under moratorium.

I understand all the immediate concerns of the safety involved in offshore exploration and development, but the big picture issue of peak oil and energy independence has been relegated to the shack out back.

It has been forgotten, for now, and probably will not be dealt with until the crisis begins. I won't go into a huge diatribe on politician's short sightedness, but when our leaders simply look at the immediate issues without considering long-term and much larger issues lurking in the future you can be assured we will have yet another spike in energy prices in the near future.

There are a couple opportunities in all this mess. First, this likely ensures the viability of Alberta's Athabasca oil sands deposits. Putting aside the numerous environmental concerns with this source of oil, Canada is a politically stable country and oil sands development does not require deep drilling technology.

The Athabasca oil deposits are immense, covering some 54,000 oil-soaked square miles or the equivalent of approximately 1.7 trillion barrels of oil.

The sheer size of the deposit allows for long-term investment and oil sand metrics have been improving with much cheaper natural gas and greatly increased capacity to refine heavy crude content.

Even as we speak, roughly one out of every six barrels of oil consumed by a US citizen comes from the Canadian oil sands. Buying those companies that have reserves in politically stable regions in the world or companies involved in helping explore and extract the difficult oil from technologically challenging finds should benefit immensely over the next few years.

Second, alternative energy is now returning to the front page. If the US is going to push for any semblance of energy independence, it will need to employ numerous forms of alternative energy.

Look for the re-introduction of an energy security bill or even a revised form of Cap and Trade.

Right now approximately 80 percent of the world's energy is derived from fossil fuels. If we move slowly away from this, there is an absolutely massive addressable market for many forms of environmentally friendly forms of energy.

Nathan Kowalski is the chief financial officer at Anchor Investment Management. He holds a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation and Chartered Accountant (CA) designation.