Today I was listening to this great rundown of the global oil supply situation on the Financial Sense Newshour with guest Jeffrey Brown VP of Global Oil Supply Analysis for Logi Energy (featured on the first 48 mins of this audio track.

Some key facts I learned from the podcast and elsewhere:

• 25% of the worlds oil comes from 25 oil fields
• the rate of field collapse is increasing
• Mexico’s Cantarell field went from 2.2mbd in 2001 to 722,000bpd in 2009 (yikes!)

Essentially the take away from this podcast was that the rate of depletion will be determined by how fast developing nations continue to grow. Seems straightforward enough but its just a way of saying that no one really knows how fast we’ll run out of oil which can be supplied to developed nations. However, it seems that with current field collapse rates the optimistic date of 2020 for a peak will likely be moved closer to our current time if we haven’t passed it by already.