The Oil Drum

(New readers, click "there's more" below for the whole article...)

Global Total Liquids production and oil price, January 2002 to present. Production data from the IEA, data files supplied by Rembrandt Koppelaar. Monthly average WTI oil prices from Economagic.

With oil reaching $135 / barrel, Oil Drum readership exceeding 30,000 unique visitors per day and many wild stories circulating in the MSM as to why oil prices are so high this post strives to explain why oil prices are rising exponentially:

• Supply and demand
• Decline of older fields
• Declining net energy and energy density
• New mega-projects
• OPEC spare capacity
• Peak exports

Greyzone and others worked a while back to assemble as much data as they could about the largest producing oil fields, their peak year, and whether or not they were in decline, and if so, the decline rate.

I thought I'd repost this as a discussion point, but also to accomplish two other goals: 1) can we expand this to the top 50 fields easily? is that a worthwhile exercise? and 2) is there any more data out there that can fill in the blanks (note that most of the missing data is from SA) that are present?

Here's a link to the data, and here's a link to the original thread that started this all.