Plantagenet wrote:Don't forget the world is using 93 million bbls of oil each day with OPEC providing about 35 million bbls per day. All the oil OPEC provides is conventional, the vast majority of from legacy fields that have been producing for decades. Ghawer in Saudi Arabia alone produces about 6 million bbls per day.
Those fields are going to peak, one by one, and quickly decline.
Lets return to this topic after Ghawar peaks---which it is very close to doing. Peak Oil theory will seem a lot more viable then.
Cheers!
I used to believe with all my heart in part from reading Twilight In the Desert, that Ghawar was at or even just past peak. In 2005. Now? Who the heck knows? It has been the world champ field for about half of the oil age, and its still pouring out the black stuff.
When it does finally happen and if it goes into an 'average' kind of decline rate of say 5 percent, well nobody will be able to cover that up more than a few months at most unless the world is in a massive recession/depression and they can supply all the demand from other Saudi fields so its not obvious. If they are pumping close to flat out like today there is no room to cover any gap. If it had peaked in say 1984 when they were producing a minimal amount of oil in KSA they could have easily covered the decline until they went to max production in 1985-86 to regain market share from OPEC cheaters.