Kind of like the "theory" of evolution, right?

Paulus -

I ran out on you the other day, but not your little monkey. I never abandon four year olds. And I never will.

Trust me. I need some down time. I try to hide, but it is getting harder. I need to sleep. My friends are good. But I run so much. It is killimg me. I am not long for this world.

Obviously when I'm dead I can't prove it. I can taste the salt im my tears.Count it between what CERA says and what Dave says. Running average. If I'm alive I'll talk. Nobody knows. They just guess. You know that.

The safest place for Paulus P junior and all his sisters is an island called Mykonos. Paris Hilton and all the smartest people in the world know that. That's why they all congrregate there.

I don't have an answer. I just post the numbers. I just post what I see. I don't know.

The answer is simple.
Russia is beginning to softly co-ordinate its export policy with OPEC.
An official SPR in Russia doesn't exist yet. But you have to take into account the fact that a pipe has a volume. The existing oil pipeline system is the best SPR.
A 1000 km pipe with 1m diameter has a volume of around 5 million barrels. Some abandoned parts of the system (for example the line to Lithuania) could be used to store excessive supply. So, OAO Transneft can fill in its system with marginal oil for a long time. This is so called technical oil.
By reducing the export of oil to the `near abroad' - Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine - Russia achieves two goals simultaneously: to exert political and economic pressure onto not-fully-loyal countries and to synchronize the export policy with OPEC.

LevinK
I like your hypothesis. It feels good. It's appealing in many ways. It fits much of what I know about how the world works.
Problem is without a serious prosecutorial investigation it's only a hunch. No way to verify. We may never know.
But I do trust the Oily One to keep on top of this.

Stealing of oil and oil products from the pipeline system is a large criminal business in Russia: not so long ago there was a whole illegal fleet of small primitive distilleries in the south of Russia - Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan. (Though after the war the majority of them were eliminated.)
But stealing is a constant. It can't alter the volume of export, at least not in millions of barrels.

How could you tell, the Green? I've even adopted the scheme for my own work - with variations, of course.

Yes, Sorry, GZ. I didn't attribute anything, did I? Everything is BP numbers. From The last two - 2006(2005) and 2005(2004). I just went through it and verified.

The 4% was something I added. I looked at consumption the last four years (on right) and saw an average and a high (2.5%) and threw in 4% as a gift. More on that later. Should we call that liberal?

I've developed a preference for yearly historical numbers vs. revision-prone monthly's - although I do dabble a bit.

I try hard not to fall into the C+C trap. In the end I don't think it matters much.

This was not something I threw together. I worked on this for a long time. I'm going back to my history books, my family, and my DVDs. I particulary like "The Prize" and this British copy of 24 - MI5.

I've deliberately not commented on what this means for several reasons. Most of which I will probably never elaborate on. But for now suffice it to say I am glad you read this. Ask and you shall receive.

The Saudi line on capacity doesn't come in order. I got them at five, there, I think, it is more like 10 or 20. I put them there for effect. The top four are correct in order. I rarely do that. But I always post without footnotes. Hehe. Caught it bfore you did.

I trust nothing and nobody. Especially not numbers. This comes from years of being tortured in the Lyubyanka and various Chinese institutions. Reading Matthew Simmons hasn't helped. But I did stay in a Quality Inn Express last night.

My blog is a mess. I crucified myself on the post-and-see-your-right column stuff go down bottom - cross yesterday. I can fix it. I'm just too lazy. I wanna read some more TOD instead.

The "other charts" link on right hits my Flickr account. I'll update that when I think of it next. Thanks for reading.

I guess they call this blog-whoring. But I don't do ads. In my private life I have multi-millionaires asking my advice on promoting their websites. I never tell them. I think it is bad enough somebody gave them Blackberries and Nuclear weapons. WTF? I gotta save the world myself?

What? Which? Don't leave me hanging.

Well that was my point. There are no missing barrels. At least from these numbers. I'm psyched you took a second look. You  usually don't read my stuff. I'm really grateful. I mean that.

Take a third look. I'm not making this up.

The barrels are product not oil. But they are the same thing, yet nobody counts them that way.

The only question left - if you buy my (BP's)numbers - is why.

WHY?

OK - so  I hadn't read all the comments - you don't know what the numbers mean.

I spent about 6 hours yesterday tryig to reconcile BP UK oil production figures with those quoted by the DTI. I had just spent the whole of the previous day making a stacked oil production chart for UK off shore fields and was somewhat dismayed to see that the 1999 total was 2.5 million bpd and not 2.9 - which we all know was the peak.

Some of this is due to on-shore production.  The DTI were really helpful in getting to the bottom of this.  Apparently there are thousands of tons of liquids arrive onshore every day from the gas pipelines and these are not attibutable to any field.  These are recorded in the DTI's Brown Book but not on their web site.

Also, the DTI quote figures in M3 and tonnes - I always use the M3 on the basis that most of us here work in bbls - but of course in working with liquids mass is a much safer footing.  Converting from mass to volume requires knowledge of density - and this of course varies enormously depending on the liquid and temperature.  Using the DTI tonnes figures, and data from the Brown Book you get to the exact figures quoted by BP for oil in 1999.  It is much more difficult to reconcile the figures using the M3 data.

So what am I saying?  We have to be wary of getting too bogged down in detail when it is the big picture that counts.

Another effect would be relection of incoming solar back to outer space.  That would cause a significant thermal reduction in the areas covered offsetting the thermal blanket effect.

What is the relative strength of each of these effects?

As far as viewing while flying it is amazing how many of the jet trails...I mean roads of the sky, are everywhere.