Insights summarizes an idea or business official making financial news, and emphasizes the impact on the typical investor.

Oil industry expert T. Boone Pickens has made news again, and also generated some chatter in Wall Street circles, but this time not for an oil price prediction.

Earlier, Pickens predicted that crude oil, which Tuesday traded around $85 per barrel, would hit $100 -- perhaps as early as Q4 2007.

This time Pickens made headlines by stating to Bloomberg News that global oil production has already peaked at 85 million barrels per day. In other words, "peak oil" has already arrived. Pickens, chairman of BP Capital LLC, spoke at a conference sponsored by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas, a non-profit research group.

Few people know the energy industry as well as T. Boone Pickens and, if you like to follow 13-D filings in search of investment ideas, you may want to take a look at InterOil (AMEX: IOC) because Pickens has increased his stake in the company to 9.9%.

It's interesting to see the once-feared raider involved in InterOil because it looks like a very speculative investment: InterOil is working on a natural gas project in Papua New Guinea, but currently has no proven reserves and a lot of debt. All this for a market cap of just south of $1 billion.

But if you're going to speculate on an energy stock, you could probably do a lot worse than to follow Pickens into InterOil. No one knows exactly what his intentions are -- he won't talk and neither will the company -- but the presence of such a prominent oilman should help the company's future fundraising efforts. The shares have been extremely volatile of late, but the upside of a super-investor may not be priced in yet.

I would continue to watch this one from the sidelines for now.

Clean Energy Fuels (NASDAQ: CLNE) accomplished a mildly solid showing with their IPO on Friday, although the project was scaled back from previous expectations. Well-known oil man T. Boone Pickens, principle shareholder of the company, had upped his expectations in March 2007 from $287.5 million initially to $354 million, as reported by Orange County Business Journal. The expected IPO share price had been in the $13 to $17 range on an anticipated volume of 20 million shares. On Friday, however, expectations were lowered and 10 million shares were sold at $12 and the shares rose in value marginally.

It's been speculated that economic conditions were mostly to blame for both the revised expectations as well as the tepid IPO performance. Clean Energy Fuels is an established company with at least some profitable history. The IPO is expected to fund growth in manufacturing capacity and product outlets, as well as to underwrite growth of the company's customer base. Clean Energy provides natural gas for municipal service trucks, buses, and other fleet vehicles. In 2006, Clean Energy had sales of $91 million but showed an operating loss of nearly $9 million. Currently the company has an estimated market value of about $600 million, and Mr. Pickens owns about 73% of the company.

ConocoPhilips (NYSE:COP) shares tumbled today after the third-largest U.S. oil company said fourth-quarter production would be below forecasts. Higher output in Alaska and the U.K. wasn't able to offset declines in the Timor Sea, conrtinental U.S. and Libya, Reuters said. The company's shares last traded at $66.49, down $1.70 or 2.49 percent.

Exxon Mobil (NYSE:XOM) and Chevron Corp (NYSE:CVX) also fell as oil prices continued to drop They have now hit $56 a barrel, according to the Associated Press. Does that mean cheaper gasoline prices will follow? Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens for one expects oil to average $70 this year. I am not sure they will hit those levels, but I think the days of really cheap oil are over.

Still, as Bloomberg News points out. the unbelievably mild winter that we've had this year is affecting the market. Prices had their biggest one day drop since December 2004

``We're getting follow-through from yesterday because the picture hasn't changed,'' said John Kilduff, vice president of risk management at Fimat USA, told Bloomberg. ``The temperature forecasts keep going up, which, combined with a relatively quiet geopolitical picture, is clobbering both crude and heating oil.''

Expectations that world oil supplies will soon peak and then sharply decline are incorrect, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates. The research firm found that the remaining global oil resource base is 3.74 trillion barrels, three times as large as the people who believe supplies have peaked.