I'll try to put some(one else's) math into the picture.

In the recent Puplava interview, Hirsch commented that every decrease in demand of 1 million barrels per day buys us just one month — such is the rate of decline post peak.

I don't know how he came up with that number but as a starting point I suggest you try to reproduce it otherwise your assertion doesn't seem to have much validity.

South Korea exports a lot of finished products Gasoline and Diesel to China and the US and Japan.

Since you did not provide a link and I cannot find a hit for what your saying using google.

I'd suggest you be careful about double counting. If South Korea imports 12% less oil and its finished product exports are down 10% then this is the same 10% thats being counted depending on what your looking at in other countries decline. Same for the US for that matter we do export finished products esp Gasoline to Mexico. You need to be a bit careful or your double counting by mixing various sources.

I did find this.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601207&sid=aXSDAqLSp.3E

Imports dropped to 73 million barrels last month from 78.1 million a year earlier, the Ministry of Knowledge Economy said in an e-mailed statement today. The country's crude oil import bill dropped 21 percent to $5.1 billion.

Its say 72 million barrels from 78.1 YOY change.

This would be a 6.5% change in imports.

Assuming demand is down 3% in China/Japan/US i.e its export markets and 3% internally then then 6% or so sounds about right for South Korea.

And we have hints that they have cut back on exports of fuels
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssOilGasRefiningMarketing/idUSSP6494320...

Next South Korea is a big chemical manufacture and Naptha is the prime feedstock used in chemical that actually comes from oil most of the rest comes from various non-crude sources.
So a lot of their internal slow down is related to the slowdown in housing and auto manufacturing and the related plastics. The Naptha kinda skews things a bit for them.

In any case assuming 50% exports then 3% is a pretty good indicator of demand drops in their customers. Assuming that world demand was 75mbd then 75*.03 = 2.25 or about 72 mbd.

Believe it or not its in excellent agreement with what I've calculated !

World demand is about 72mbd and we have excess capacity. Going back and looking at the historical price data.

http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_Rate/Historical_Oil_Prices_...

Gives
2004 $37.66 $42.80

And

http://www.eia.doe.gov/aer/txt/ptb1105.html
A perfect fit with 2004 production of 72.52 barrels.

Assuming that OPEC really cuts and that its cuts take us to about this number and assume that some production has started to shut in and continued declines i.e Mexico we should see a tight oil market any day now. This would leave OPEC and in particular Saudia Arabia with about 2mbd or so of real spare capacity that I seriously doubt they will turn back on any day soon.

I'd say that simply reading off past years demand and prices is itself a valid and good estimate of the current oil demand more complex guesses support this.

10mbd ? Don't think so this would show up clearly in US imports alone and it has not we have seen gasoline imports decline which fits very well with the South Korean declines.

Well, here is what the Economist Magazine said in 1999:

Yet here is a thought: $10 might actually be too optimistic. We may be heading for $5. Thanks to new technology and productivity gains, you might expect the price of oil, like that of most other commodities, to fall slowly over the years. Judging by the oil market in the pre-OPEC era, a "normal" market price might now be in the $5-10 range. Factor in the current slow growth of the world economy and the normal price drops to the bottom of that range.

That the recent fall in prices has been so precipitous merely confirms that, for the past 25 years, oil has been anything but a normal commodity. Although the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world's proven oil reserves, it produces less than a third of the world's oil. If production were determined by cost and quality alone, most oil would come from these countries. Oil in the Gulf is cheap to extract-barely $2 a barrel, a quarter of the cost in the North Sea. Unlike the heavy crudes of Mexico or Venezuela, it is of high quality and high value. Much of the world needs fancy technology and expensive rigs to extract oil; in Arabia, as the old hands say, "you just stick a straw in the ground and it gushes out."

I have tried to stay away from picking both prices and time frame, since there are so many variables. For what it's worth, my two most repeated statements were that prices were best characterized as a series of doublings, $50, $100, $200, $400. . . with the caveat that I didn't know over what time frame, and I noted that the price of oil is a horserace between declining demand and a long term (and IMO accelerating) decline in net oil exports. Having said all of that, I do think that there is a pretty decent chance that the average 2009 price will exceed the average 2008 price.

And if we take the square root of $30, the price of oil would only be $5.50 in 2009.

You make some good points, but you haven't acknowledged that a strong US dollar is an implicit part of your price forecasts.