These posts have been going through the EIA list of the top oil producers in the world, over the past few weeks, I thought I might just review them collectively, but briefly, before starting to look at individual countries and oilfields. Even the posts that I have written recently have become out of date with new information (Russia increased production again in February by 20 kbd over January reaching 10.23 mbd) and then fell back to 10.2 mbd in March but at this stage, rather than focusing on such details, I am trying to generate a sense of the overall picture. It should also be recognized that I am just grabbing a snapshot of data, rather than the more detailed studies that look at the longer term, which folk such as Rembrandt, Rune and Euan provide. The simplest way to do this is to place my current estimates of production for the top 30 oil producers that I have reviewed in this series against the EIA estimate of their production in 2009.

The news from Mexico just continues to get worse with bad news from all three of their biggest oil fields, even as our perennial cornucopian talks of “a Mexican surprise.” As Gregor noted recently (h/t ft energysource) at the beginning of the year Cantarell was producing 862,000 bd and at the end of July this was down to 588,000 bd. The graph plotting decline continues to show a linear decent at the rate of 35,000 bd per month or roughly 100,000 bd every three months – giving it just 17-months at that rate (ending right at the end of next year) until there is nothing left. Somewhere in there the drop is likely to stabilize, but suddenly and soon the questions as to where the replacement hundreds of thousands of barrels are going to come from is going to stop being an almost academic exercise.

I’ve been predicting the collapse of the Mexican Nation-State since 2006. It turns out that was a bit premature. But with violence flaring, the potential for collapse in Mexico is once again in the headlines. Oil production continues to fall, border violence is up, and the government is preparing for a showdown with the drug cartels. I’ll argue below that the government will keep the wheels on through 2009, but that the Mexican state will collapse shortly thereafter, ushering in the beginning of the end of the Nation-State.

Although the days are still relatively hot and the sun high in the sky, this summer is coming to an end. The order has gone in for the wood that will help us heat the house this winter, and the students have arrived for a new semester. Which means, a little late as usual, it is time to dust off the lecture notes (which now-a-days come as Powerpoint presentations), and start the annual update.

One of the classes that I teach deals with power, both generation and use, and so I start the semester with a review of where I see that we currently stand as an overview before getting into more mundane details, such as the inner workings of a generator. The spacing of a year between using these particular slides also gives a little perspective on how things have changed, and updating individual slides emphasizes where the most significant changes have been, in my opinion. So let me show you the slides I am adding or changing, and explain, relatively briefly, why.