Petroleum Review - Oil Depletion Over 1 Million Barrels/Day, Accelerating

[hatrack]

"Last year Petroleum Review (August 2003) re-presented the BP production statistics, dividing them into producers in decline, Opec
producers with growth potential and non-Opec producers with growing
output. This year, the re-presentation of the latest (June 2004) BP statistics has been done as a continuum of producers from those with the largest declines to those with the largest gains. To damp out individual year bias the listing has been based on the average annual change in production over the last two years of data, ie the
average of the 2001/2003 output changes.

One- and three-year average changes are also listed in Table 1 and it
can be seen that decline/increase order changes only slightly depending on the period used.

Production declines for entire countries, as opposed to individual fields or regions, is a recent phenomenon. Until the 1990s the only countries in decline had been the US, which moved into continuous decline after 1985 (although peak production was actually in 1971), and Romania, that also peaked in 1985. By the late 1990s, however,
the BP statistics were showing at least 10 significant producers in
decline; 1999 added two more, as did 2000 and 2001.

The most dramatic change to be seen in the latest BP statistics is the way the 32 countries where production is still expanding are having to produce ever faster to make up for the 18 countries where decline is into at least its third year. Overall production growth in 2003 at 2.71mn b/d (3.66%) was one of the five largest annual volume increments seen since 1973. However unlike all the earlier production surges, countries with declining output were a significant factor in 2003. Because the 18 countries in sustained decline ‘lost’ production of 1.14mn b/d (–4.91%) this meant those
still expanding had to increase production by 3.82mn b/d (7.52%) in order to achieve an overall production growth of 2.71mn b/d (3.66%).

EDIT

http://www.odac-info.org/

It's the first article at the top of the page.

[brokensymmetry]

1. They're here...

That was the opening line of an old ghost story.

I suspect that the same could be said of the troubles related to Peak Oil.

[Dogmudgeon]

2. Take a deep breath

1 million barrels per day -- that's, what, about 15, 20% of the current output of the Ghawar oil field? (I'm basing that on a figure of 6 million bbl/day I saw a couple of years ago.)

As recently as last week, I thought that wellhead output had something to do with oil price; but a couple of alert DUers put me wise to some studies providing evidence that I was working under an assumption I accepted from industry P.R. It's starting to seem like there really is no connection except on longer time scales (as a guess, greater than one year).

It's not "when is the other shoe going to drop?" but "when is the other shoe going to be dropped?"

--bkl