Steep decline in oil production brings risk of war

Although there is growing evidence that oil production has peaked, or is about to, I dont believe that the decline in production will be as rapid as some expect.

The present high oil price has resulted in record exploration for new oil, and in the exploiting of known but previously uneconomic fields.
It appears unlikely that these new sources will make up for declines in established fields, they would however slow the rate of decline.

There are a number of known or likely oil resources that are not being exploited for enviromental or political reasons (Deep parts of the north sea, alaska, of the USA coast, even the UK mainland)
None of these new oil fields are anything like the size of the giant fields in the Middle East, therefore exploiting them wont increase world production, but would slow down the rate of decline.

However one should not be complacent, even a modest decline in oil supplies would lead to large price increases.
Prices have roughly doubled in the last year, and may well double again in a year or two.

Any field yet to be found will take about ten years to bring to the market and all the deep sea drilling rigs are booked for the next five years so that means 15 to market. It would also take about 5 years to build new semi submersible drilling rigs so there's no shortening of the lead time there.

The new "large" Brazillian offshore fields are said to be a total of 33 billion barrels in extent which is only a years world supply and the difficulty and cost of drilling to the depths required through a salt pan will mean that the flow rate in likely to be low. This holds for many of the offshore fields.

The Detroit fields in the US/Canada are also difficult in that the oil bearing beds are in very thin layers of not very porous rock, requiring much horizontal drilling, so the flow rates there are also likely to be low and the oil expensive.

All in all, although there appears to be a lot of oil coming up, it will not be soon, the field sizes are not very large and the flow rates are likely to be low so they may reduce the rate of depletion but they are unlikely to reverse depletion for any significant length of time and they won't come soon.

Gordon Brown has so much faith in Saudi Arabia's ability to increase oil production that he is begging them to invest in renewables and nuclear in the UK.

Oil has just fallen by about $10 , yes ten dollars from about $146 to about $136, this is a bit suprising, anyone know why? USA gone bust and cant afford it!

A cynic on another website said it was because a major US bank was in trouble and having a "fire sale" of assets including oil contracts.