Thanks Khebab for your useful comments

hmm... maybe but it seems that growth is occuring mainly in the other liquid category:

Correct

growth in C+C seems to have stalled despite planned new supply from megaprojects:

Correct but is this a temporary trend or a sustained one? That is the big question, which is very dependent on what is happening in Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iraq.

It seems to me that these forecasts have been somewhat optimistics and were forecasting something very close to business as usual (i.e. ~2%/year growth in supply). The actual production plateau was not predicted (see chart above). Have you conducted a post-mortem analysis?

Yes, I have the projects in my database, and did some post-mortem work. One could even argue that the decline is somewhat smaller, if the decline in Saudi is voluntary. I still don't feel that we have a definite answer on this.

The presence of a plateau is not obvious on your Figure, it seems that production growth from 2005 to 2010 is pretty much inline with the growth we had between 1982 and 2005.

That depends on how one defines plateau. I called it an upsloping plateau, which in the light of demand growth is correct (demand outstripping supply).In the absolute term it is incorrect. Next to that it also depends on what numbers one takes, Liquids Production has increased with 1 million barrels per day from 2005 to 2006 according to the IEA. However the EIA figures do not show such an increase but a "real" plateau.

The point of this exercise was not to look at a plateau vs peak from a micro scale but from a macro scale. Ill try to be more clear next time in my definitions!

Is the decline rate stationary? if you look at production decline in mature regions, the decline rate seems to linearly accelerate (~0.13% per year):

First we need to define what we mean with decline rate, in this post I looked at the total stock of existing fields (including those in a built up phase of production, on plateau and already past-peak). Your chart seems to include total production over time, not total production from a point in time. And then the development of the decline rate over time of that amount of production.

As to whether the decline rate is stationary, it is not. According to some it goes in cycles because of the addition of new production (in the case of existing stock through technology), and the outfasing of quickly declining oil fields over time. The technological vision is that the decline rate can be slowed down in a period of high oil prices.

To my opinion it is not correct to compare the development of decline rates in one oil producing region to another. This will lead to bad estimates because each region has many different characteristics. The problem here is then again a lack of data. While logistic models in general if sufficient correct data input is supplied can give an excellent outcome, we don't have such data. Fortunately over time we are getting somewhere, data quality is improving!