Oil headway will fail to meet demand by Adam Porter

During the next six years, global oil supplies will be constantly tight. Even with a minimum of demand growth and a series of fields ready on the day they are supposed to be, shortfalls will still occur.
Negative capacity

“What is worrying in itself is that after 2007 the number of projects of any sort really starts to drop off. In general it takes six years to bring new fields online. Even if fields are announced today, they will not be producing any oil until at least 2010,” says Meyer.

Supply from 18 countries is in permanent decline
“Even though we know that in general on-stream dates do tend to slip within the oil industry, after 2007 under all our scenarios we see negative capacity occurring.”

Because as well as finding fields and increasing demand there is another less mentioned factor in play.

“Depletion of oilfields is something that is not widely recognised. But we now know that a number of major producers are in decline.

“That lost capacity has now reached significant proportions. From the figures provided by BP we know that the world is losing an annualised one million barrels a day with 18 producer countries now in permanent decline.”

Aljazeera.net