Over the holiday, the IEA made the December 11th Oil Market Report publicly available. Adding in that data point to the recovery chart for global liquid fuel production I've started tracking has improved the agreement on the slope between the three freely available estimates. The average slope of the three sources now corresponds to 3.7 ± 0.4 mbd/a*. That is, the rate of increase over the last seven months corresponds to adding an additional 3.7 million barrels/day of production each year. That's surprisingly fast. If that were to continue, we'd be retesting the series highs in the first half of 2010 - we have 1.5-2mbd still to go. The previous series highs were achieved in July 2008 when oil prices averaged over $135.
*The error bar based on standard deviation of the three slopes for each data source should be taken with a pretty big grain of salt.
I posted on TOD about the latest revisions to the megaprojects wiki; if the data is correct and the decline rate is growing 1%/year as per the WEO 2008 then we should decline about 525 kb/d in 2010. I notice they expressly state in the OMR that supply gains, however sluggish, won't eat into spare capacity, given <1% growth in demand. They project a 2.05 mb/d gain for 2010, too. Don't know where that comes from, perhaps they're rolling previous years' supply gains into the present, which is sensible given that many fields take a few years to reach peak output.
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