The Oil Drum | Global Oil Risks in the Early 21st Century

The Oil Drum | Global Oil Risks in the Early 21st Century: Today, over 60% of the world production originates from a few hundred giant fields. The number of giant oil field discoveries peaked in the early 60s and has been dwindling since then (H�k et al., 2009). This is similar to picking strawberries in a field. We picked the biggest and best strawberries first (just like big oil fields they are easier to find) and left the small ones for later. Only 25 fields account for one quarter of global production and 100 fields account for half of production. Just 500 fields account for two-thirds of all the production (Sorrell et al., 2009a). As the IEA (2008) points out, it is far from certain that the oil industry will be able to muster the capital to tap enough of the remaining, low-return fields fast enough to make up for the decline in production from current fields.
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The EROEI of US domestic oil production (chiefly originating from giant oil fields) has declined from 100:1 in 1930 to less than 20:1 for developments in the 2000s, e.g. Gulf of Mexico,(Gately, 2007; Hall et al., 2008; Murphy and Hall, 2010). Since giant and super giant oil fields dominate current production, they are good indicators for the point of peak production (Robelius, 2007; Höök et al., 2009). There is now broad agreement among analysts that the decline in existing production is between 4-8% annually (Höök et al., 2009). In terms of capacity, this means that roughly a new North Sea (~5 Mb/d) has to come on stream every year just to keep the present output constant.