This is a guest post by Stephen Sorrell, senior lecturer Science and Technology Policy Research, Sussex Energy Group, and lead author of the UKERC Global Oil Depletion report, and Christophe McGlade, doctoral researcher at the UCL Energy Institute. This post was slightly revised by the authors and updated here on 25/07/2012. Please see paragrapghs 8 and 9 below the fold for the updated text.

The 76 page Belfer Centre pdf can be downloaded here. This critique by Sorrell and McGlade first appeared in the ODAC newsletter here.

Commentary on: Oil: 'The Next Revolution: The Unprecedented Upsurge of Oil Production Capacity and What it Means for the World' - Leonardo Maugeri, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University

Summary Maugeri's analysis and conclusions are critically dependent upon the decline rates applied to existing and future fields, and yet he does not explicitly say what these decline rates will be. However, Maugeri’s assumptions can be derived from his Table 2, which projects gross and net capacity additions over the period to 2020. Doing so suggests he uses an average annual decline rate for all fields of 1.6% over this period, which is less than half of the IEA and CERA estimates for 2008 (4.1%/year and 4.5%/year respectively). The discrepancy is even greater since the IEA and other analysts project an increase in average decline rates over the 2011-20 period. If we replace Maugeri’s 1.6% decline rate assumption with the IEA estimate of 4.1%, the projected loss of production capacity over the period to 2020 increases from 11 mb/d to 26.5 mb/d. In turn, the projected global production capacity in 2020 reduces from 110.6 mb/d to 95.1mb/d (a reduction of 14%). Since average decline rates would be expected to increase over this period, this projection must be considered optimistic.

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently released full-year 2011 world oil production data. In this post, I would like show some graphs of recent data, and provide some views as to where this leads with respect to future production.

World oil supply is not growing very much

The fitted line in Figure 1 suggests a “normal” growth in oil supplies (including substitutes) of 1.6% a year, based on the 1983 to 2005 pattern, or total growth of 10.2% between 2005 and 20011. Instead of 10.2%, actual growth between 2005 and 2010 amounted to only 3.0% including crude oil and substitutes.

The shortfall in oil production relative to what would have been expected based on the 1983-2005 growth pattern amounted to 4.7 million barrels in 2011. This is far more than any country claims as spare capacity. This is no doubt one of the reasons why oil prices are as high they are now. These high oil prices tend to interfere with economic growth of oil importing nations.

The shortfall in growth especially occurred in crude oil. Figure 2, below, shows crude oil production separately from substitutes.

Between 2005 and 2011, crude oil production rose only 0.5%. It was mostly the substitutes that grew.

Recently, the International Energy Agency’s Chief Economist Fatih Birol was quoted as saying,

In the next 10 years, more than 90% of the growth in global oil production needs to come from MENA [Middle East and North African] countries. There are major risks if this investment doesn’t come in a timely manner.

While I agree that we need more oil production, I think we are kidding ourselves if we expect that 90% of the needed growth in global oil production will come from MENA countries. In this post, I will explain seven reasons why I think we are kidding ourselves.

Reason 1. MENA’s oil production, as a percentage of world oil production, has not increased since the 1970s, suggesting that MENA really cannot easily ramp up production.

MENA’s oil production amounted to more that 40% of the world’s oil production back in the mid-1970s, but is now down to 36% of world oil supply. It is hard to see anything that looks like an upward trend in MENA’s share of world oil supply, even when high prices hit. OPEC talks big, but its actions do not correspond to what it says.

Russian visitors had already noted the presence of oil seeps in Alaska, although they had not done anything about it by the time the tsar sold the land to America on March 30, 1867. Russian history would have it that some $165,000 of the $7.2 million of the sale was used to persuade doubting American legislators and members of the media of the value of the purchase. The oil can still be seen coming from current seeps such as this one:

These seeps occur both on and offshore, and as happened in the rest of the country, it was these seeps that brought prospectors to the region and where the first wells were drilled.