Sorry, but you’ve just run out of excuses…

There is not a single reason left for you avoid emerging-market oil, and here is perhaps the safest way for you to play it.

We’d been watching oil-services giant Schlumberger Limited (NYSE:SLB) for a while. When it announced Q2 earnings on July 18th, we knew it was time for our emerging-market investors to get in on the action.

The commodities boom in emerging markets is real. It’s making the rich even richer, but more importantly multitudes of poor people are getting a crack, often for the first time, at an upwardly mobile life that bubbles up through the entire economy. Once this starts to happen in developing countries, you want to get in on it.

Certainly, emerging markets are working quite well for Schlumberger.

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The news is great in emerging markets…India’s growing middle class can now afford servants.

The boost in Brazil’s currency makes the country’s treasury bonds more attractive than ever.

And Russia, China, India, Malaysia, South Korea and Brazil still look like great bargains compared to the U.S.

Is this all easy money ripe for the pickin’?

Not exactly…with oil jumping $11 last Friday, inflation running rampant on forecasts of $5 gas and Wall Street’s banks sinking deeper into the abyss investors are grinding their teeth figuring what to do next.

The mental horsepower needed to extract profits from these storm-tossed markets has never been greater. That’s why I was truly dismayed to read a front-page story in our hometown Baltimore Sun about American teenagers who will be our future business leaders.

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An article in Business News Americas may tip off investors to a profit gusher in Mexico.

Their small piece I saw yesterday reported that Mexico could take front and center in an important investment conference this September. If some of the news we expect is actually announced, it could be one of the biggest bombshells to hit Latin oil.

At the Latin Asia Business Forum 08 (LAB08) held in Singapore from September 22-23, Mexican officials could detail their progress on rewriting the legal framework for private investments in state-owned oil.

Mexico’s LAB08 presentations could detail initiatives that would let foreign companies have greater participation in public-works projects for transportation, telecommunications and energy development.

And it’s the energy development that caught our eye. As I write this, a revamp of Mexico’s national oil company is being pushed by President Felipe Calderon.

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There are those who will tell you that oil is a cyclical business and a global fungible commodity. It rises and falls with the business phase. If you look at a hundred-year chart, it is as obvious as a sidewinder on a sand dune. A sine wave through time — up and down in seven-year cycles.

But there are others who believe in the “Peak Oil” argument, the ultimate end-game, like a Suburban crushing a Subaru at the end of a long hill. Peak Oil enthusiasts will point to long lists of numbers, detailed maps of known reserves, past prognosticators of genius, and declare with tinfoil-hat fervor that “we are running out of oil.”

I’ve read these books and listened to the speeches. The idea that there is a finite amount of oil on the planet, and we are near the point where we will extract less in the next hundred years than we did in the past. Makes sense to me, as does the business cycle. I don’t know if the hundred-year history of the oil cycle is over. There is always a “this time it’s different” ideology at the peak. But then again, sometimes, it is different.

What we do know — what isn’t in dispute — is that oil is expensive, and that by all accounts the easy oil has already been found and is being extracted at a furious pace.

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