Archive for January, 2009

It looks like we have hit the plateau of the peak of global oil production

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

There’s a really good, fairly long, and very in-depth overview of global oil production and discovery numbers

Oil Field Discoveries

This table really says it all in my opinion. But there’s a lot more information in the story, about pretty much every part of the industry you might be curious about.

Just so you understand it, with most global oil fields in decline, at around 5-7% yearly rates, that means, globally, we need to put online about 4-7 million barrels new production per day. Yet, as you can see from this chart, we have added almost no significant new production in the 2000s. This is not a small problem, it’s a very serious issue, and it’s the dead give-away that global peak oil production has almost certainly hit us, now. And what’s left is hard to extract, expensive, and lower quality.
(more…)