"Oil & Gas Journal reports that global oil production peaked in 2000. Production levels in 2001, 2002 and so far in 2003 were below that of 2000. If the bell-shaped world oil production curve is mathematically smoothed out a little, the actual peak year will be 2004. On March 6, 2003, the Dow-Jones news service reported that Saudi Arabia had notified Western oil companies that collectively, Saudi oil fields have reached maximum production. This means that Saudi Arabia, which possesses the largest volume of unrecovered oil in the world, is passing its own peak of production."
http://tinyurl.com/2g2nnAnd from an interview with Princeton geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, April 4, 2003:
"It was last October in a meeting out in West Texas that Henry Groppe of the Houston firm of Groppe, Long and Lattell got up, I was still shuffling my papers and he was giving his talk and he said, 'The peak of world oil production is going to be the year 2000', it would be the biggest year. And I sort of came awake, took a deep breath and began watching not just Henry Groppe, but the news about this and the oil and gas journal publishes lists of country by country world oil production in the last week of each year and low and behold in the years 2001 and 2002 the oil and gas journal numbers showed that the world oil production had not been as big as it was in the year 2000. Now 2003, this year is not off to a great start, Venezuela's been off-line, Nigeria's been off-line and obviously there's a messy war going on in Iraq right now and Iraq is off line.
"So 2003 is not going to out produce the year 2000 and beyond that we've always heard that the OPEC countries and particularly Saudi Arabia had the capacity to produce another 2 million barrels a day on top of the 8 million barrels that they had been producing. However on March the 6th of this year 2003, a story came across the Dow-Jones news wire announcing from the Saudi Arabian government to Western oil companies and government's that the Saudi's would not be able to go beyond 9.2 million barrels a day and they were already producing that much. In effect, the Saudi's were max-ed out at this point. Now that doesn't mean they're out of oil, there's still a lot of oil left but their production capacity is at saturation. Now suddenly this brings up a parallel to what happened in the United States in the 1970's because we got a similarly cryptic announcement that the Texas Railroad Commission in 1972 announced, that production would not be rationed in Texas the next month and that Texas was producing wide-open and at that point those who could translate that strange announcement knew that the United States has no more surplus production capacity and we were thereafter dependent on imports. Now when the same message happened on the Dow-Jones newswire March 6th, there was no notice in the New York Times and I'm a registered Democrat, I don't really read the Wall Street Journal but no-one seems to have noticed that the Saudi's have announced that they were now at their production capacity, which in turn means that the world is now at it's production capacity and it looks very much as if the year 2000 record is going to stand.
"So in one sense I'm greatly relieved that the prediction I made in the book has come true. This is the year 2003 and I said it was 2003 or 2004 and it's a great relief to be a historian and not a prophet crying in the wilderness."
http://tinyurl.com/2ncef
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