With relatively little fanfare on the international stage, Lundin Petroleum and Statoil (and partners) have just recently jointly discovered one of the largest oil fields ever found in the North Sea. The Aldous Major South - Avaldsnes discovery on the Utsira High structure is currently estimated to contain 1.7 to 3.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil. The astonishing thing about this discovery is that it has lain undiscovered in a mature oil province for so long providing ample encouragement for explorers to go on exploring.

The recoverable resource estimates have grown with every well drilled and with a new delineation well spudded on 28th November, further news on the size of this giant is expected in early January.

This post is joint with Rune Likvern. One of us (EM) owns common stock in Lundin Petroleum.

This current series of posts is aimed at an overview of the top oil producing nations, seeking to establish how the ranking of the countries is changing from the original table that EIA put out in 2008. After looking at the conditions governing the top six, this was followed last week when I looked at the condition of the following three (Mexico, UAE and Kuwait) in a little detail, but having spent four posts on Veneuela in the recent past forebore going back there again.

It is worth recapping, however, that the initial order has changed, and that Russia is currently at the head of the League, slightly ahead of Saudi Arabia, with both producing somewhere around 10.2 mbd. I’ll go more into that detail as the posts focus in on the individual countries later. The United States' production, if one includes ethanol, is around 8.2 mbd, and this is in third place. China has moved into fourth place, slightly ahead of Iran which is followed by Canada. At present these six appear to be the only countries producing over 3 mbd.

In the next tier down I have already mentioned the United Arab Emirates, which have moved into 7th place, with a production of around 2.81 mbd, now ahead of Mexico, albeit perhaps barely (based on the addition of NGLs etc). As with the UAE Kuwait has been limiting production in line with OPEC requests, but while only producting at around 2.35 mbd at the moment, is looking to increase this to up to 3.5 mdb by 2015, which would move it into the top tier. Venezuela, although it too has some grandiose plans, based on the potential increases in production from their tar sands, is currently producing at down around 2.26 mbd. As I have mentioned Venezuela does have plans to raise production to 4 mbd by 2015. However recent commitments to China of up to 1 mbd and problems that Venezuela continues to have in meeting current obligations leaves a large question mark on those predictions.

And so we come to the lower half of the second tier.

This is a guest post by Paul-Frederik Bach. Paul-Frederik has more than 40 years experience in power system planning. He worked with grid and generation planning at ELSAM, the coordinating office for west Danish power stations, until 1997. As Planning Director at Eltra, Transmission System Operator in West Denmark, he was in charge of West Denmark's affiliation to the Nordic spot market for electricity, Nord Pool, in 1999. Until retirement in 2005 his main responsibility was the integration of wind power into the power grid in Denmark. He is still active as a consultant with interest in safe and efficient integration of wind power.

Since 2007 the end of year water level in hydro storages in Norway has been steadily falling. In 2010 a low inflow of water combined with a substantial increase in electricity consumption has caused Statnett to classify the energy balance in Southern Norway as on “Alert”. This is step 2 of 5, where step 5 is rationing.

Currently, the market seems to be ignoring the decline of such short term energy reserves. This article is an attempt to understand the reasons and perspectives underlying current changes in Norwegian electricity supply policy.

In the first part, we tried to estimate the implicit decline structure behind the IEA analysis of worldwide decline rates. We established that only 11.8 mbpd of a total of 69.8 mbpd were not in decline in 2007 (17.0%) and for the Super-Giants/Giants group, the IEA claims that around 20% (9.2 / 42.5) are still growing fields. I'm now trying to answer the following question: is the decline structure observed for the world and the SG/G group closer to a pre-peak or a post peak production? 

Based on the only field-by-field datasets publicly available (Norway and the UK) and looking at the decline structure we came to the following conclusion: If the decline structure for the world follows the decline structure that has been observed for UK+Norway, there is an 85% chance that the world's oil production is in final decline.