Regional Oil Extraction and Consumption: A simple production model for the next 35 years Part I

摘要

The growing conflicts in and about oil exporting regions and speculationsabout volatile oil prices during the last decade have renewed the publicinterest in predictions for the near future oil production and consumption.Unfortunately, studies from only 10 years ago, which tried to forecast the oilproduction during the next 20-30 years, failed to make accurate predictions fortoday's global oil production and consumption. Forecasts using economic growthscenarios, overestimated the actual oil production, while models which tried toestimate the maximum future oil production/year, using the official country oilreserve data, predicted a too low production. In this paper, a new approach to model the maximal future regional and thusglobal oil production (part I) and consumption (part II) during the nextdecades is proposed. Our analysis of the regional oil production data during past decades showsthat, in contrast to periods when production was growing and growth ratesvaried greatly from one country to another, remarkable similarities are foundduring the plateau and decline periods of different countries. Following thismodel, the particular production phase of each major oil producing country andregion is determined essentially only from the recent past oil production data.Using these data, the model is then used to predict the production from allmajor oil producing countries, regions and continents up to the year 2050. Thelimited regional and global potential to compensate this decline withunconventional oil and oil-equivalents is also presented.