Actually, reading Google's translation of Rembrandt's post, he seems to imply things could be even worse, given the impact on production from financial turmoil:

In the longer term, the economic downturn just before additional problems because there is less investment in oil production, far less than needed, according to the IEA. On this basis and looking to the oilfields in production in the next five years it is increasingly clear that oil production will peak around 2011/2012, and may depend on the behavior of OPEC earlier. The oil industry will be very hard to attract to the production after 2010 to legs, and in the current financial climate, this seems an impossible task. However, the agency in the WEO down the production with considerable investment will grow to 106.4 million barrels per day until 2030. This compared with a current production of 86 million barrels per day of total liquid fuels, and 74 million barrels per day of crude oil. The figure is a bloodletting in comparison with the previous report, where production amounted to 116.3 million barrels per day in 2030. According to the Financial Times it is possible that production in the final report even lower because this draft is a month old, and the latest insights on the financial crisis are not included.

I've been tallying Credit crunch impacts on production. Someone will read the roll call soon enough. This latest from Reuters is a doozy: FACTBOX-Financi al crisis hits global oil investment. Whole page of cancelled tar sands operations. And many say the credit unwind has just started!

fields in decline, decline at 9.1-6.4%?

Over the past few weeks I've been seeing references here on TOD to decline rates significantly higher than the 2 or 3 percent I'd somehow come to expect - and why did I come to expect that??? It strikes me that a 5 or 6 percent rate - or something close to 10 percent - would make for very rough sledding. Perhaps the lower rates implied a full-bore effort at replacement, but with energy depletion taking out the financial system and destroying the ability to replace energy sources, the decline rate only gets steeper with every misfortune.

Has anyone else been noticing the stories about higher than expected depletion rates or is it my eyes only?

cfm in Gray, ME

The official WEO 2008 Executive Summary is out today and is quoted here: http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.aspx?feed=OBR&...

It looked at 800 of the world's oilfields and found the average rate of decline was 6.7 percent for those that have passed their production peak. It expects that rate to increase to 8.6 percent in 2030.

800 wells sounds like a familiar number.

Chris