I assume this is just oil or does it include condensate? Also it would be interesting to look at boe/d which includes all liquids and gas. The reason for this is that oil production decreasing at some companies may be also indicating a shift in strategy....from oily to gassy. This is quite common in the large companies .....their production is large to begin with...to show reserves replacement (required by the investment community) is difficult in oil simply because the targets are smaller...it is easier to do with gas if you are in the right place (i.e. close to market or access to LNG markets). Somewhere in that period Chevron unloaded a bunch of properties that belonged to the various entities prior to all of the mergers....any idea from the annual reports when that happened and how that affected the year to year rates?

So I guess what I am saying for this to be a proxy for declining global oil supply it has to be demonstrated that it isn't necessarily a shift in corporate strategy. The individual companies don't actually care if they are producing more oil or more gas....they just look at the bottom line of delivering cash flow/share performance and continued dividends.

The numbers I gave are "Net Liquids Production." The quarterly reports also provide data on "Net Natural Gas Production." I'm not going to look at all the natural gas production data, but in the year 2000 natural gas production averaged 4,466 MMCF/D, while in the first half of 2005 it was 3,764 MMCF/D, about 16 percent less.

Sure that makes sense, if it costs too much to try to get more oil or gas, then they are better off producing less, right? Anyway, this is just for one company so it obviously doesn't mean global oil production has peaked. What I think it does show is that despite much higher oil prices they produced less oil. If it had been easy/profitable to produce more oil why wouldn't they? The obvious answer is that it just isn't that easy (these days), even for a big global company like Chevron.

it sure would be a viable reason for the rising oil prices

today I've read in a Belgian newspaper something like 'hooray, oil prices went below 60$' and an 'expert' stated that this was the evidence that the only reason for high oil prices is due to speculation
It's funny how some people really don't have a clue of what's going on

That's a nice figure! The only one who looks like they are keeping up is BP. I wonder how much of BP's increase is from their 2003 purchase of TNK in Russia.

Yes cool picture, could somebody calculate the summarized graph of all the single graphs? Because now it's sort of not really clear how strong that downtrend is, some heading upwards...

The PDF doesn't have all the data that the chart shows. There's only six quartly data points the others are annual and averages. Where did the data for that chart come from?

I converted the table from the PDF into a spreadsheet and graphed it myself.
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ENI (Italy) is keeping up. Wheren't they expelled from Venezuela though?

BP, that chart is showing about a 2.5-3% decline rate. That's about what I expected.

But even that kind of decline rate can turn out very disasterous, especially when the oil consuming nations refuse to switch to alternatives in effort to keep profit margins and incoming tax revenue maximized... Aren't we in for a bumpy ride?

Thanks for the work BP, that's as clear a "sentence" as one can get...

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

READ: Oil Companies producing less than before.

Not potential, not maybe, not coulda-shoulda-woulda.

Less.

Well if you changed that to some oil companies producing less you would be right...otherwise not.

To take a more in-depth look at this I put together info from annual reports for 43 multi-nationals and independents. The numbers plotted are Total liquids produced (oil and condensate). Note that Total numbers include various subsidiaries of companies like Exxon whereas the Consolidated values include only the Parent.



Note that for the Top 10 producers (as of end 2004) only 2, Chevron and Shell show drop in total production year over year from 2002. This lost production is made up by the majority of the 43 that showed increases over the period 2000 - 2004.



I also broke down BP into production by country over the period 2000-2004. As LadyRuby surmised the main increase in production was through the acquisition of TNK....all of the increase in production was in Russia and former CIS. The decrease at Chevron is not surprising either. In a study conducted in 2003 by Wood Mackenzie Chevron was found to be the only multi-national that had actually destroyed coroporate value during the period 1996-2003 through exploration. Because they were so unsucessful at exploration they were forced into the Texaco merger and then this year into the Unocal merger. Chevron has been a bit of a dismal story in terms of home grown exploration given that most of their pre-Texaco production was gained through the acqusition of Gulf Corp.

Contrary to the multinationals who seem to be growing through acqusitions there are a number of Independants who show year on year production increases through exploration, albeit at lower overall numbers (eg: Anadarko).

There were a couple of problems I ran into....for example I have no year end 2004 number for Yukos so I kept it the same as 2003. As well I was unable to find reliable production information for Petronas Carigali, Sonatrach etc. Looking at country production information over these same periods might help to fill in that information.

Can you cite your sources?

All numbers are collected from annual reports. I did not collect them personally....I have chimps...I mean staff that do that sort of thing

The country production I am putting together will come from 2 sources, IHS Energy compiled and World Oil published. These numbers are going to be much less reliable I'm afraid.