The decline of oil has already begun - Greenpeace International
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/29458/peak-oil-decline-coronavirus-economy/
I recall my father estimating that the peak might be around 90 mb/d, which now looks close, perhaps slightly optimistic. About half of global oil production depends on the world’s top three producer nations; the US, Russia and Saudi Arabia. World production outside these three peaked in 2017 at about 52 mb/d, and has since declined by 6%. “Not every nation other than the big three have peaked,” Patterson reports, “but cumulatively they have peaked.”
Most of Russia’s oil comes from aging fields in Western Siberia that are in decline, and Minister of Energy, Alexander Novak, has warned that Russia’s oil production could drop by 40% by 2035. Saudi Arabia – in spite of threatening to increase production – also appears to be in decline. According to Bloomberg, the giant Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia is “fading faster than anyone guessed.” Last year, Saudi Aramco oil company published financial figures, revealing that Ghawar’s historic production has declined by 24% in six years.
Aramco reports a natural decline rate of 8%, which means their production would fall by half in less than nine years, without investing billions annually into new wells and new technology on marginal sites. In 2005, Saudi Arabia increased its operating rig count by 144%, to increase oil production by 6.5%.
According to a 2019 Geological Survey of Finland report, the world average decline rate on post-peak production is 5 to 7%, meaning that oil production could plummet to half its current volume in the next 10 to 14 years.
Over the past decade, only a massive, expensive, noxious, water-and-chemical-intensive fracking campaign in US shale fields has kept the “all liquids” petroleum peak at bay, at least until 2018. However, even this ‘shale boom” is a ruse, made possible by massive debt and unpaid environmental costs.