No Subject

Matt Simmons:

 >>Perhaps the biggest challenge facing future oil supplies, is that almost 
70% of our existing daily supply still comes from oilfields found over 
30-years ago. Anchoring this old production are 10 giant OPEC oilfields 
whose average age now exceeds 60-years. These 10 fields, alone, still 
produce probably 15% of our daily oil supply. Only a few of these old 
fields are now clearly in a high rate of decline. Sooner or later, all will 
begin a steady descent, like all oil and gas fields consistently do at some 
stage in their life cycle. Sadly, there is almost no public data available 
on what these giant OPEC fields even produce today, let alone whether most 
of then have now peaked. There is zero knowledge for what the current 
decline rates of any of these fields are, let alone what they might later 
become.
The world knows from past experience with giant fields like Prudhoe Bay, 
all the North Sea giants, Columbia's Cuisiana Field and many others, that 
once giant fields decline, their decline rate is as steep as smaller 
fields. The only difference is the amount of volume lost.
In the past two decades, only a handful of new fields generated daily 
production that exceeded 500,000 barrels per day. The last field whose 
production exceeded 1 million barrels per day was Mexico's Cantarell field 
which began production twenty-five years ago. No field discovered in the 
past 20 years, or on today's drawing board is expected to exceed this 1 
million barrel per day production limit. <<
http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/research/docview.asp?viewnews=true&newstype=1&viewdoc=true&dv=true&doc=203