Whither the Bumpy Plateau of Oil Production?

Back when the October IEA total liquids number came in, Jim Hamilton at Econbrowser cited it (and other things) as evidence that there were “signs of gains in global oil production”. JD at Peak Oil Debunked had a similar reaction. I felt that was premature since that one high datapoint was not a statistically significant departure from the overall flat plateau that oil supply then appeared to have been on for the last 1-3 years (depending on your choice of data).

However, a few months have passed, and the evidence for a change in trend in oil supply now seems somewhat stronger, albeit there is still a lot of uncertainty and conflicting data. I won’t draw firm conclusions in this piece, but I’m starting to lean towards a bump up in 2008, rather than a bump down.

Let’s start with the numbers for total liquids from the EIA, the IEA, and (for the first time) the OPEC monthly oil market report (MOMR)…

The Oil Drum