Kuwait's Largest Oil Field Peaking

There are still lots of otherwise very intelligent-seeming people out there who still express doubts about the reliability of the "theory" of peak oil -- the past examples of Texas and the North Sea apparently are not rigorous enough examples for them. Well here is another.

AMEfn, a very reliable middle-east news site reports:

It was an incredible revelation last week that the second largest oil field in the world is exhausted and past its peak output. Yet that is what the Kuwait Oil Company revealed about its Burgan field.

The peak output of the Burgan oil field will now be around 1.7 million barrels per day, and not the two million barrels per day forecast for the rest of the field's 30 to 40 years of life, Chairman Farouk Al Zanki told Bloomberg.

He said that engineers had tried to maintain 1.9 million barrels per day but that 1.7 million is the optimum rate. Kuwait will now spend some $3 million a year for the next year to boost output and exports from other fields.

However, it is surely a landmark moment when the world's second largest oil field begins to run dry. For Burgan has been pumping oil for almost 60 years and accounts for more than half of Kuwait's proven oil reserves.

Here's your oil futures graph from the last year. Click on image for larger version. Anyone wanna bet that oil will go below $50bbl again?