The following is a guest post by Phil Hart, a petroleum facilities engineer and member of ASPO-Australia. Phil worked for Shell in the UK for five years, before returning home to Melbourne in late 2006. Phil's blog can be found here.

Following a summary of EIA data for 2006, I thought I would make a more detailed country-by-country estimate of the potential for 2007.

Starting with the headline EIA figures for last year:

Crude Oil and Condensate: 73.5 Mb/d (down 0.2)
Natural Gas Liquids (NGLs): 7.9 Mb/d (up 0.14)
Other Liquids: 3.3 Mb/d (up 0.08)

Total Liquids: 84.6 Mb/d (up an insignificant 0.02)
Mb/d = million barrels per day
kb/d = thousand barrels per day

Numbers for November and December suggest real OPEC production cuts in Algeria, Libya, Qatar and UAE. The total cut could be 230kb/d which knocks around 50kb/d off annual average production. I did not expect to find evidence for cuts, but that's how the data looks to me - four small cuts made at the same time by countries that otherwise increased their production last year through announced projects. Thus, I believe those four OPEC members, but only those four, have the ability to restore that production. Without those cuts, crude and condensate production would still be clearly down, but total liquids would have shown a somewhat more significant increase.