The Oil Drum

Here are two projects due in the next couple of years just from SA ALONE that add up to 560k per day

So, we only need about 30 Khursaniya projects to meet the net decline over five years at 2% per annum decline rate. And again, net exports are falling much faster than overall production is falling.

A couple of points.

You are only talking about accelerating our rate of extraction of finite fossil fuels, in a desperate attempt to keep the supply of Liquid Transportation Fuels (LTF's) stable to growing. Fossil fuels can be viewed as a continuum, from natural gas to natural gas liquids, to condensate, to light/sweet crude, to heavy/sour crude, to bitumen, to coal. We can get LTF's from the endpoints, but the capital and energy costs goes up significantly, and again, all we are talking about doing is accelerating our rate of extraction of fossil fuel supplies.

In regard to Natural Gas, there have been several articles suggesting that world gas supplies are overestimated, and the US case history doesn't offer much support. Our all time record high natural gas production was three years after oil peaked. In any case, Saudi Arabia has already started curtailing some projects because of a lack of natural gas supplies.