As you can see, Russian production bumped up by 200-250 thousand barrels/day a few months back (due to new eastern siberian production), but since then has been relatively flat.
So there's a bit of a mystery on the production side that I need to track down. As of my last check-in, global production has increased by about 2.0 - 2.2 million barrels/day since the trough of the recession last year:
But of the most obvious suspects, neither Saudi Arabia nor Iraq have contributed much at all to this, and Russia is only responsible for about one tenth of it. I need to figure out which countries are responsible for most of the production increase.
Saudi Arabia has gigantic oil storage facilities in the country. One year ago they probably where filled to max, maybe they tapped some from them..
ReplyDeleteAnother explanation could be that there are not so many oil tankers used for storing oil now as one year ago.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the follow-up on this one.
ReplyDeleteAn excerpt from L. F. Buz Ivanhoe; Hubbert Center Newsletter 98-3 http://hubbert.mines.edu
ReplyDelete"Oil Production
Figure 1 shows the oil production cycle of a country in its “declining” phase. The Ex-USSR’s
total crude oil and NGL (natural gas liquids) production dropped from 12.5 million barrels per
day (MMB/D) in 1983 to 7.2 MMB/D in 1995. It is suggested that the USSR’s first production
peak in 1983 was the “Hubbert Peak”, while the second peak (12.6 MMB/D) in 1987 represented
a “maximum-effort peak” resulting from an all-out attempt to reverse the nation’s first
production decline.3 A symmetrical “Hubbert Curve” (“A”) drawn as a mirror image of the
ascending production curve from 1950-1983 through the 1983 peak would intersect the declining
production curve at 1996 and continue downward to about 5.5 MMB/D in the year 2000, and to
2.0 MMB/D in 2010. Of course any production from new (Caspian Sea, Sakhalin Island, &
other) fields and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques will accordingly increase the Ex-
USSR’s total annual and ultimate production after 1995. This is shown schematically as a
“bump” (“B”) on the right-hand side of the indicated simple Hubbert Curve “A”. (It is quite
possible that most nations’ production curves will show a similar “maximum-effort peak” a few
years after the local “Hubbert Peak” occurs, e.g. USA production bump in 1985.)"
Robert - well, that was a way-off prediction!
ReplyDeleteHi Stuart,
ReplyDeleteUsing the IPM from the EIA, I looked at Production from May to December 2009.
Change in output May- Dec 2009
Crude + Condensate (MB/d)
Algeria .07
Angola 0.15
Nigeria 0.2
SA 0.15
OPEC 0.4
US 0.19
Canada 0.3
China 0.09
Russia 0.2
Kazakhstan 0.15
World C+C 1.5
Liquids (MB/d)
US 0.36
OPEC 0.6
Non OPEC NGL 0.2
World 2.1
Note that Liquids includes NGL, Biofuel, and refinery processing gains
Of the 2.1 MB/d increase in liquid output 1.5 is crude + condensate, 0.4 is NGL (half coming from OPEC) and 0.2 is US Biofuel or refinery processing gain. Of the C+C increases 1.3 of 1.5 MB/d comes from OPEC, Canada, Russia, US, and Kazakhstan.
If the data is comparable then current Russian production is currently less than that of 1987. Ivanhoe did hedge his bets with: "Of course any production from new (Caspian Sea, Sakhalin Island, & other) fields and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques will accordingly increase the Ex-
ReplyDeleteUSSR’s total annual and ultimate production after 1995." Elsewhere he states that various experts predict a world peak between 2000 and 2014.
-- I first heard peak oil theory discussed by the McGill biologist N.J. Berrill during the 50's and have followed the controversy loosely since that time.. There have certainly been some inaccurate predictions and educated guesses about oil and other resources made by experts as varied as the Paddock Brothers and the Texas A&M professor Earl Cook. Ivanhoe claimed that Hubbert did not make true predictions about the peak of world oil production. He was too good of a scientist. He was pressured to make projections for publications such as Scientific American.