Stuart,

Excellent work, and I think this should help build the case for calling on mitigation efforts to be started now by governments and industry. The probability that we are at at or past peak is not zero.

BTW, The legend on the plot of monthly Russian oil production has the moving averages for IEA production and rigs swapped.

Clint

You're right on the swapped legends. I'll fix it tonight.

I also wanted to congratulate you for having your work on KSA referenced in the EWG's report. I've always enjoyed your objective analysis and was glad to see some credit given to you and TOD.

Clint

The lables for rig count and IEA are swapped in the rig/production chart. It freaked me out seeing such a vast difference in the IEA and EIA figures, which are always reasonably close. Blue is rig count and the dark red/green is production. This is very telling and goes a long way in refuting the standard argument that high prices will cause more drilling and more oil. A similar chart for Saudi Arabia would probably look the same.

That's basically the argument of the piece. A collapse in the marginal return on effort of drilling is probably a symptom of being very close to peak.