The Oil Drum: The Plateau Background: The Chart of Peaking Oil Supply

The latest IEA Oil Market Report is out. In their inimitable style, they say:

World oil supply rose by 445 kb/d in May to 85.0 mb/d, fuelled by increases from OPEC, a lull in North Sea maintenance and recovering US GOM supply.

That sounds good, doesn’t it? A healthy increase from April to May? What they don’t tell you is in April they were claiming supply was 85.1mb/d, which they’ve now revised down to 84.55mb/d. You have to be keeping track to notice that. This gives the realization that April, which they had said was the highest supply month ever, is probably not that special (we’ll know better when the US EIA weighs in on April supply at the end of this month).

Anyway, this means basically that the pattern of the last eighteen months of more-or-less flat supply is continuing. The moving average graphs now look like this…

Many more of Stuart’s charts after the jump to The Oil Drum.