When commenting each week on global energy trends, sometimes I write from home. Sometimes I drive to the office, and sometimes I'm overseas. Last week, a reckless driver removed my car from the mix, and I'm actually happy about it.

My trusty 1994 Jeep Cherokee (R.I.P.) got crunched overnight while parked in a service lane across from my Baltimore home. The lane is narrow, but not narrow enough to merit this:

What's more, the son-of-a-goat who rode my car from bumper to bumper took off. Either this person was blitzed, had no insurance, or was listening to music at volumes too ear-splitting to notice the distinct sound of metal on metal.

Here's the deal, though: I recently read that nearly 80% of American commuters drive to work alone.

I hated being part of that demographic, especially when my cruise to work requires more fuel to get up to the fifth floor of the parking garage than to get down the slight incline of Saint Paul Street towards the Chesapeake Bay. I recently started feeling like a sucker, wanting a way out of my car commitment without getting injured and without having to junk the hunk of metal after putting a couple thousand bucks into it in the past year for inspection improvements.

Having good insurance took care of repair debts, and left me with plenty of money to get a spiffy new bike. My savings on various car-related costs over the course of just one month will come out to about $250, a serious chunk that I can invest in energy in other ways than my usual donation to the nearby Hess filling station and to various undemocratic regimes throughout the world.

And as you know, there are plenty of investment opportunities around. Today, I'm going to focus on a theme I debuted at the Angel Research "Profit from the Peak" Summit earlier this month in Philadelphia.

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My main point at the conference was this: During the age of oil's establishment as the lifeblood of the world economy, the monarchies of the Persian Gulf have accumulated wealth beyond the wildest dreams of Constantine.

From minor feudal scraps of desert with a few miles of shoreline, these emirates and kingdoms bloomed with the fertilizer of international investment, and their people became accustomed to lives free of labor and taxes.

Now, Peak Oil is looming, and the countries whose hydrocarbons we have slurped up for the past two generations shudder to think that the spigot of wealth may soon be shut off.

Sure, oil prices have quadrupled in recent years, but exploration is getting more difficult as well. World supplies are dropping in every region except Africa and the former Soviet Union, whose bounties were relatively ignored as the Middle East garnered most corporate and national attention for oil and gas trading.

Now, world oil supply is in overall decline, and longstanding supply sources in the West and in the Persian Gulf are leading the global trend downward:

What I've noticed lately is that the supply vs. demand disparity you see above isn't the only thing making news. It's becoming harder by the day for Peak Oil naysayers to say that supply peak models are hogwash.

Especially when the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council--the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman--are busily diversifying their national investment portfolios away from reliance on local resource wealth.

In a two-part series I've written in our sister publication Wealth Daily over the past couple of weeks, I outlined some of the major developments in the Persian Gulf states' vigorous new drive to secure lucrative capital flows to finance their opulent lifestyles.

Dubai and Qatar are fighting over international stock exchange prominence, with their royal families locked in a battle like we haven't seen since the post-World War I sheik-ups portrayed in Lawrence of Arabia.

Abu Dhabi, which along with Dubai is one of the richest of the United Arab Emirates, is building a major solar power array in the desert outside of the city, cooperating with engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make sure their panels pass muster.

And this week, Abu Dhabi showed another facet of the powerful punch that Gulf investment will bring to the world's most prominent markets.

On Tuesday, the Abu Dhabi National Energy Company (known as TAQA) spent $5 billion in a deal to acquire the Canadian operator PrimeWest Energy Trust. PrimeWest shares gapped up in American trading, proving just how powerful these sovereign-wealth-fueled buyouts can be to individual investors' portfolios.

TAQA's acquisition of PrimeWest follows a May buyout of Alberta's Northrock Resources and August's purchase of Pioneer Natural Resources, moving its international asset base steadily upward from its $21 billion total to a goal of $60 billion by 2012.

TAQA was just founded in 2005, with the Abu Dhabi government calling the shots with cash distribution to places like Canada, which zoomed to the number-two position in world oil reserves rankings with its oil sands endowment.

From drawing investment to feeding investment, the Persian Gulf states are turning a major corner at a perfect time. As leverage-backed buyouts slow down due to the sub-prime bust, these countries that don't need credit are coming to the rescue with their coffers.

Like my car, the old oil and gas wealth base in the Persian Gulf may have gotten you through some good times, but it won't last forever.  Unlike me, I don't expect the Gulf countries to wait for a crash before switching to a new means for getting where they want to be.

Regards,

Sam Hopkins