The katest OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report is out with OPEC crude only production numbers for February. All data in the OPEC charts below is in thousand barrels per day and the last data point is February 2015.
Total OPEC crude only production was down 137,600 barrels per day in February.
Algeria seems to have stabilized their decline.
The weekly Baker Hughes Rig Count for North America and the International monthly rig count is out. In the charts below the monthly data is through February 2015 and the weekly data is as of March 6th.
World Rig Count, counting oil, gas and miscellaneous rigs are down 684 rigs over the last three months. The annual spikes you here are caused by Canada.
Removing the seasonal Canadian spikes gives you a better picture of what is happening to the world rig count.
The latest OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report is out with all the OPEC crude only production numbers for January 2015. There were very little revisions in the December numbers this month.
Total OPEC production of crude only was down 53,000 barrels per day in January to 30,153,000 barrels per day of crude only.
Algerian production has leveled out in the last year and a half but down slightly the last couple of months. January production slipped 13,000 bpd to 1,130,000 bpd.
In this life nothing is certain. Therefore I am not declaring, absolutely, that we are at peak oil, only that it is a near certainty. But I am putting my reputation on the line in making the claim that the period, September 2014 through August 2015 will be the year of Peak Oil. Below are my reasons for making this claim.
First of all, Peak Oil is not a theory. The claim that Peak Oil is a theory is more than a little absurd. Fossil hydrocarbons were created from buried alga millions of years ago and they are finite in quantity. And as long as we keep extracting them in the millions of barrels per day, it is only common sense that one day we will reach a point where their extraction starts to decline. In fact most countries where oil is extracted are already in decline. So obviously if individual countries can experience peak oil then the world as a whole can also experience peak oil.
All charts below are in thousand barrels per day of Crude + Condensate with the last data point September 2014.
First I want to deal with the portion of the world that reached peak oil about four years ago, in January 2011. That is everywhere else in the world except the US and Canada. I am not saying that every country outside the US and Canada has reached peak oil, but combined they have reached peak oil
The world outside the United States and Canada has been on a bumpy plateau for ten years now and now, even with that last September 2014 surge, is still 1,670,000 barrels below the peak of January 2011. However only a few countries is responsible for this plateau.
The bumpy plateau actually began back in 2005 where the peak was in July. Since them, outside the USA and Canada, there have been 15 countries with production increases and 21 countries with production declines. Here is a look at the 15 winners outside the US and Canada.
Dealing with the winners one at a time:
The EIA publishes what they call a Drilling Productivity Report in which they claim that each rig is getting more productive, that is each rig produces just a little more oil each month than it did the previous month. But over the long haul, I find that the exact opposite is true. In every place in the world, each rig produces a little less oil every year.
Baker Hughes publishes monthly their International Rig Count where we can find the world rig count back to 1975. However I only looked at the last 15 years and found some surprising results.
The last “Rig Count” data point on all charts below is December 2014. Also, very important, the rig count includes rigs drilling for gas as well as oil since Baker Hughes does not break down international rigs down to either gas or oil. They just give us the total rig count.
The last price collapse we had, in late 2008, the rig count dropped by over 1,570 between September 2008 and May 2009.
1,114 of that 1,570 rig count decline in 2008 and 2009 came from the US alone. That was the number of rigs dropped by the us between September 2008 and June 2009. Read More