R.I.P.

It's a sad day. The Oil Drum is going away, a site yours truly admired and used as a valuable resource when talking about peak oil and the consequences of what happens when demand for fossil fuel energy outstrips supply. What made the drum different was the way it presented complex data in ways that could be understood by rubes like me.

The world currently produces around 91 million barrels a day (mb/d) of ‘oil’ in the International Energy Agency’s definition, which is for all liquids. For the past two years, actual crude oil production (which includes lease condensate in the EIA’s definition) has been hovering around 75 mb/d on an annual basis, just slightly over the 74 mb/d plateau established in 2005.

The moment of truth for peak oil will be when the decline of mature fields finally overwhelms new production additions, and global supply begins to turn south. (A vogue alternative is that we’ll reach “peak demand” first, where oil is replaced by other fuels and demand falls due to greater efficiency, but as yet I find the proof that this has happened, or will happen, unconvincing.)

That moment of truth isn’t quite here yet. Fracking, along with all the other methods the world is employing to squeeze a bit more oil out of the earth, has barely budged global oil production. Here is the chart:

As per the wont of BRT, Peak Fish, the supplier of the graphic above, is a new resource BRT will use as Peak Fish "takes hard to locate, difficult to understand public data and displays it in a way that's readable and visually appealing."

Works for me.