Peak Oil comes to ExxonMobil

ExxonMobil's annual net production of crude oil and natural gas
(in millions of barrels per day)


http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2009/10/working_harder.html
Source Econobrowser.

There are countless ways to interpret the machinations of a corporation like Exxon. What is not in doubt is that the projected 3% increase in production per year in 2001, and 2006 fell flat.

Looking at the raw figures, it's hard to see much of a relationship between price and production, a hallmark of either inelastic demand or fixed supply. These figures combine both crude and natural gas, but let's look at oil:



Bright new fields of tens of billions of barrels in reserve are being announced every few months, but always without the critical data, what is the rate in barrels per day available.

Exxon is not the worlds only oil company of course. It can increase production by purchases. Other producers may doing better (or worse). The fact remains, the rate of production from the world's biggest fields continues to slow.

But I'm sure that has nothing to do with it.

While it is possible that XOM has hit peak oil I would like to see 3-5 years in economic growth and rising sequential years of demand where supply remains flat or false.

XOM *may* have hit peak oil but the data given is weak at best.

and I really don't think that it's coincidence that it's gone up and down as the world economy has. I'd be interested in seeing a similar graph for predicted and actual world oil consumption.

To be clear, I tend to accept many of the peak-oil arguments. I just don't think this graph necessarily shows what you think it does. It might, but there's a pretty big piece of the puzzle not being addressed.

The only exception to this flat lining is when World Wide prices started exponential growth in 2006-7. Ignoring India, China et al. through the looking of US GDP is well, short sighted.