The Oil Drum

Browsing around to see if I could come up with any pictures to show how the oilfield production at Samotlor and Romashkino in Russia depleted, I came up with two sources for the illustrations that follow.  The first were some rather small pictures in Matt Simmons presentation to CSIS, which can be found as a pdf if you scroll to the Feb 24, 2004 date on this site. The picture that I have used is slightly redone to try and clear the numbers.

The second source I came to, for the Romashkino curve, was a part of a review by IHS (note pdf file). This gave the overall production for the entire Volga:Ural basin, that includes Romashkino, which is what I was looking for.

I am putting these up to show that large fields, and these were two of the worlds giants, can collapse fairly rapidly. And once they are gone it takes a lot of smaller fields to make up for the production that has disappeared. It is worth downloading the IHS presentation since it has some illustrations that show where the various fields lie.