Rate of Recovery of Global Fuel Production

Update: See revision to this here.

If you take that last graph, and look at each series only from its lowest point in early 2009 forward, you get the data in the graph above. I added trend lines (with equations and correlation coefficients) and extrapolated them a bit. Also, I showed the previous monthly high for each series in the level of the dashed lines.

The slopes of those lines correspond to 1.7mbd/year (IEA), 2.2mbd/year (EIA) and 3.5mbd/year (OPEC). Obviously, it's a pretty noisy situation, but it does seem like global production is recovering at or above the 0.7-1.5 mbd/year range that I recently suggested global demand might recover at.

And it looks like, if present trends continue, sometime in the latter part of 2010 or early 2011, we will start to test the previous highs for monthly oil production.