A reprint of a portion of that Eric Reguly article Dec 1stEuan Mearns, an oil analyst I like a lot because he is independent and not really an analyst - he's a geologist and good researcher who strays off the beaten path - produced a fascinating little chart recently on his Energy Matters site. The chart showed that conventional oil and condensate - the "black" oil that comes out of the ground easily and relatively cheaply and can be refined into gasoline - reached a production level of 73 million barrels a day in 2005. Guess what? Almost a decade later, conventional oil production has not climbed even though prices were high for most of that time. What drove global production up to the current 92 million barrels a day or so was non-conventional production - the oil sands, U.S. shale oil, biofuels and natural gas liquids. The problem is that most of this production is highly expensive and a lot of it, like the gas liquids, is refined into heating fuels, such as butane, not transportation fuels, which are the biggest oil products market. Barring a technological breakthrough, the world has probably seen "peak" conventional oil production. That means any significant production gains will have to come from non-conventional oil. Continued low prices can only damage that production.