The plateau started in 2004. The price of oil has more than doubled since then and now at the end of 2007 production numbers are pretty much the same. That is by definition Peak Oil. History has already been written and it says in no uncertain terms: Market forces are defeated, Peak Oil is real, it is here, it is NOW. In all honesty I don't think we have 5 to 10 years. In three years or less for all practical purposes the world we are living in now will have ended.

Leading figures from the Middle East oil industry added their voices on Tuesday to those warning that the world is struggling to sustain rising oil production.

"There is a real problem -- that supply may not be possible to increase beyond a certain level, say around 100 million barrels," Libya's National Oil Corporation chairman Shokri Ghanem said at an industry conference.

"The reason is, in some countries production is going down and we are not discovering any more of those huge oil wells that we used to discover in the Sixties or the Fifties."

Sadad al-Husseini was a key architect of Saudi Arabian energy production policy for more than a decade whilst a top official at state oil firm Saudi Aramco. He was even more pessimistic, saying world oil production had already plateaued.

"We are already three years into level production," Husseini also told the annual Oil & Money conference, a gathering of top executives.

Apply your logic to the history of OPEC. If they stop exporting, they will risk attacks. They have lived in extravagant palaces for decades while the people have suffered. Now the money is even better!

They will sell every last drop while the money is there.

WWIV already? Yes, the White House is preparing us for an invasion of Iran. That case has been made by many neocons, most recently by Norman Podhoretz in his new book, "World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism." And as Pat Buchanan reacted on MSNBC's "Hardball" about all their warning signals: "I don't see how [the White House] can avoid attacking Iran and retaining their credibility going out of office."

edit: maybe i should rephrase my first paragraph as a question so as not to sound like a dumbass. what i mean is, why do we relate the oil production graph to a normal distribution curve, and is this valid? because it SEEMS to me that the resemblance is only superficial and coincidental and that plotting a linear production rate through time is just a completely different thing than plotting relative statistical frequency. so, if it is only a superficial resemblance, how can predictions based on the normal distribution curve carry any weight at all?

You see this in other fields as well such as signal processing, where one can, but need not, work with Gaussian windowing functions for, say, the Gabor transform. It has nothing to do with statistics really in the form of some random variable being described. It just so happens that the the standard deviation of a Gaussian "distribution" curve can be found through the second derivative. I guess there will be some dark connection between all of this, but anyway.

If the normal distribution model for oil production is correct, then production slope deceleration is maximum at peak. This argues for rapid decline in production, rather than a plateau, from the peak.

But there are lots of things which could change what happens.

Like an attack on Iran.

You are confusing production deceleration with production rate.

More from Mr. al-Husseini and friends:

World oil output struggling, say Arab experts

Proven oil "reserves" are overstated by 300 billion barrels of speculative "resources", mainly in OPEC countries, he said. By 2030, production of oil and natural gas liquids could fall to about 75 million bpd.

but the production rate is zero (at peak),

The contemplation of things as they are,
without error or confusion,
without substitution or imposture,
is in itself a nobler thing
than a whole harvest of invention.

Francis Bacon

But if what I read at The Oil Drum and Peak Oil are correct, peak oil was in about may 2005 so we may be headed down the roller coaster side of peak oil?

I don't know. Not my areas of expertise. I only read ... and think. Hopefully slowly and carefully.

best

You know that point you reach on a roller coaster at the top of the first drop just as the chain kicks you loose and your stomach begins to ascend into your throat?

That's where we are right now.