Average decline of all 22 peaked countries is approximately 4.6% or 4.7% depending on which year you take as a starting point (1996 or 2003). 4% post peak would therefore be an optimistic setting, especially when including deep sea decline rates. A few years after peak something like between 5% and 6% seems like a more likely decline rate then 4%. Before peak it is ofcourse different and then 4% seems more reasonable

Conventional Oil reserves peaked in 1979 and have been falling ever since.

Peak oil has a number of factors, including an increasing recognition that burning oil at such massive volumes is a problem, in itself. This potential restraint to production is never considered by people who argue that oil production will increase, possibly because the entwining of the two subjects is just not clean enough - it is possible to accept the geology of peak oil, and its engineering aspects, but the entire framework of human society, including recognition that the short term must be balanced by a longer term? Too complex - and besides, people who think burning fossil fuels idiotic need to prove their position, while we all accept that economic progress through increased economic activity is in and of itself a public good beyond dispute. I have read there is some real cheap land available in West Virginia and Alberta - I wonder why people keep moving away from coal and tar sand mining operations, since cheaper land would seem to be the sort of economic benefit which would attract people, not repel them.

Simply saying that it will be possible to pump that much is not enough. Which I don't quite imagine will happen anyways - both the Gulf and the Russians have been throwing some real wrenches into scheduling over the past few years, while the Nigerians are just being typically unstable, over the last few years - and as for Iraq, well, you can decide whether production is likely to go up or down in a society which seems to be increasingly violent and riven. But decline is real, and neverending in places like the U.S.A., Great Britain, Norway, and well, at some point, that list will include every oil field on the entire planet.

I am not sure that such heroic measures of oil recovery will be as acceptable in five years as they are among the brave pioneers at the frontiers of human technology making us all observers in a world wide, real time lab experiment to empirically see what happens when CO2 is re-introduced to the atmosphere on a geologic scale in a timeframe which has nothing much to do with geology, but an awful lot to do with our and our children's lives.

• the amount of new discoveries in the deepsea
  
• Timing of new/expanding projects comin-onstream in the 2012/2017 timeframe