Peak Oil Now? New Data Leads to Speculation

New data from the U.S. government shows something disturbing. We may be looking at the peak of oil production, right now.

The data comes from the United States Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency's (EIA) report on Global Oil Production, published earlier this week. The black diamonds show the production data. The error bars show a range of 1% to allow for inaccuracy in measurement. The thick regression curve is a best binomial fit.

It is fairly apparent that oil production has reached a plateau. Growth in the oil supply seems to have stopped.

By extending the best fit curve out two years, we would find that by December of 2008, world oil production would be only 82 million barrels of oil per day (mbpd). This suggests the world may have reached peak oil, the history making all-time maximum of global oil production.

For those looking at similar data two years ago, it would have suggesting an annual supply growth rate of about a 4%. At that rate, global oil production would have reached 93 mpbd by now.

With a two more years of data, even a 2% growth rate projection was optimistic. The world is no where close to 93 mbpd. It looks unlikely that production will reach.......