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Happy Peak Oil Day?
Posted by Stuart Staniford on November 24, 2005 - 2:30am
World crude oil production (exclusive of NGL), as estimated by the Oil and Gas Journal. The highest production so far occurred in May 2005. The graph is not zero-scaled.
“We have only two modes—complacency and panic.”
—James R. Schlesinger, the first energy secretary, in 1977, on the country's approach to energy
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Thanks for this post Stuart, I thought this day would pass by without being noted.
Around here the few scattered peakoilers are trying to raise awareness for this matter once more - this time in a concerted manner.
I'd like to invite everyone already aware of Peak Oil, to take this day and discuss it with people not yet aware. You can send Happy Peak Oil Day postcards to your friends, mail everyone in your address book, whatever you think proper. It could be just a family talk during the Thanksgiving gathering.
Better do something than just sit and watch everything fall apart.
Tomorrow everyone will think we're lunatics. But, Who Cares?
I've got a little piece of land. Even if it is winter season it still has kale on it, as well as cabbage, sunchokes and chard. I got quite some potatoes from it last summer, despite an attack of late blight.
We'll get by somehow.
Prices are high because production can't keep up with demand, but sofar I haven't seen any real evidence of a world peak, I think it is still some time away.
In person he would say he made the prediction tounge-in-cheek. He then says it could be a few weeks to either side.
I almost forgot it. Remember that since October and till the end of December, OPEC is officially producing flat out.
If so and May is still the highest month...
Two and two makes what?... ah, five!
Cheers,
The same happened with the Texas Railroad Commission when the US-48 peaked.
It effectively cannot be used to fill the gap because refining capacity does not exist for it... We could well see rising inventories with rising prices and the lead time on new refining capacity is in years...
Unfortunately, that process appears to be only about 63% efficient (see page 37). We'd need a lot more heavy crude than light to do the job; about 1/3 more for gasoline, almost 1/2 more for diesel.
I think it would be great if Goodstein and Deffeyes got together. Their areas of expertise complement each other. The weakness in Deffeyes' books is that he doesn't get into the thermodynamics of alternatives enough, while Goodstein is all about thermodynamics.
http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/popups/quotes.html#Goodstein
"With his folksy style and penetrating vision, Deffeyes tells it like it is. This book is another nail in the coffin of the age of oil."
--David Goodstein,
Vice Provost, California Institute of Technology,
and author of Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil
I live a ways from Caltech now but I'll see if I can drive down and attending this talk.
Or maybe not? But that's a lot snappier than what the graph seems to indicate, the dreaded undulating plateau at 72.25/mbd.
Is it now time for Saudi Arabia to explore the perhaps aptly named "Empty Quarter"? Personally, I think it is time to pay a visit to the Great Khan of Central Asia
bearing gifts and good wishes, despite his idiosyncracies-- On this day of thanks, we should not be disturbed that God put the oil in some inconvenient places nor should we shirk our obligation to do everything in our power to obtain it. Allahu Akbar!
Of course the graphed data is uncertain. Stuart was being ironic or facetious and so was I. So let's see if 1st or 2nd quarter numbers in 2006 indicate higher available supply numbers. But worldwide production growth is clearly not the answer--the true solution is re-scaling of national economies (US or Japan) to do more (or the same) with less.
I (and Stuart, HO and the others as well, I think) believe the current evidence for a real peak in the near-term is becoming more compelling. That's why we post here. I understand your concerns as you "[give] a talk to a group of Japanese economists about peak oil". We're all concerned. Nobody looks forward to a world-wide depression.
I can only make light of an obviously precarious situation given the fact that (at least here in the US) we've done virtually nothing to mitigate the effects. What else can we do here? TOD and others have been sounding the alarm for some time now. I only hope the coming crash in the next few years will be gentler than I fear.
best, Dave
Anyway, that's why I criticized the use of the chart. If my point was made too bluntly, I apologize. But this is becoming a fight with real swords, and one where you have to watch which way your seeming allies are swinging theirs.
http://www.energybulletin.net/11107.html
evidently, according to a group called platform (??) the iraqi poo-bahs are in the process of lining up PSA's (production sharing agreements with oil "multinationals" viz:
The report, titled "Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq's Oil Wealth", said the majority of Iraqis were against the large-scale involvement of foreign companies in the post-Saddam era. "Iraqi public opinion is strongly opposed to handing control over oil development to foreign companies," it said.
"But with the active involvement of the US and British governments a group of powerful Iraqi politicians and technocrats is pushing for a system of long-term contracts with foreign oil companies which will be beyond the reach of Iraqi courts, public scrutiny or democratic control."
now....who do you think those "multinationals" in question are??...let's see...the germans, french and russians worked with saddam before the war...and the americans and british were shut out..does that mean the PSA contracts will have a return address Houston,Tx.??
In financial markets analysis we'd call the period cfrom early 2004 to now a "pause" - its a consolidation zone, the underlying trend remains, for now, intact, and that trend is, for now, still UP.
A series of higher lows within the consolidation zone maps out a structure we call an ascending triangle. In financial markets an ascending triangle within an uptrend is considered a "bullish" pattern. I prefer to consider them as the pauses they are; what's yet to be known is whether the uptrend has legs to continue or not.
Some might argue that its unfair to apply financial price analysis techniques to oil production volume charts, but I disagree - oil and the economy (price driven) is inextricably linked to point of being synonymous. Until such time that world wide economic growth can happen with less and less oil (instead of more and more which has been the case for decades), we should be able to ascertain clues to the trend of production using price analysis methods used to model any market.
Carrying this a step further, the trend will officially reverse from up to down if production were to make a set of lower swing highs and lows under 71,000 k bbls/day. Whether such an event is caused by peak production or world wide economic contraction is another matter entirely.
Unfortunately, reality smacks pseudo-sciences like economics upside the head from time to time and there's only 1 ounce left in the bottle. Economics tells us nothing about future production, only about potential future demand. People like you, who cannot see beyond their programmed cultural mysticism, are why no valid response will occur to the peaking of oil supplies until it is too late. And down that road lies conquest, war, famine, and death.
Bottom line is that "price" is not a scientific measure. Production rate, if real, can be a scientific measure. Price is not. I've already ranted on it here
That is pure mind-twisting rhetoric.
I suggest that YOU prove conclusively that everything can be proved conclusively.
Almost nothing can be proved "conclusively" to all people.
Tyically new information is surfacing all the time.
So few things are "conclusive".
Or at least new, ignorant people are surfacing all the time.
The "market" rarely witnesses full dissemination of knowledge to all ranks of players (the hustlers, the suckers, and the not-yet-scammed masses of greed driven sheeple in the middle) all the time.
Remember cigarettes and cancer?
How long did it take for the "markets" to factor in the truth?
Way too long for many who died needlessly of lung cancer.
Scientists had proved the link "conclusively" to the scientific community.
But those who stood to lose money muddled the waters.
They came up with that same "conclusive"
manipulation line you are trying to use now.
Oil and mud don't mix.
Mother Nature doesn't heed our "conclusive, convulsive" noises. The oil will peter out no matter what. A peak production point will be hit no matter what. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, as Humphrey Boggart may have put it, but all too soon.
Was Deffeyes correct that Thanksgiving 2005 was the magic day? We will never know conclusively.
You should bone up on efficient market theory, which has demonstrated to most folks' satisfaction that market prices include all available information. (It's why trying to pick stocks or time the market is a losing proposition.)
Rejecting efficient market theory is analogous to rejecting the theory of the biotic origin of petroleum. There are some people who believe in abiotic oil, but, as we've seen recently on TOD, they tend not to be taken seriously. Likewise, you won't find much support among academics for those who reject efficient market theory.
Market manias are basically Ponzi schemes. More and more people (with less and less investment experience) are sucked in as the mania continues. The longer it lasts, the more sceptics finally give in, the assumption being that there'll always be a bigger sucker down the road to sell to at a profit no matter how outrageously high the price one paid. It continues until the biggest sucker has been fleeced. The smart money cashes out in time and leaves the public (and their pension funds) holding the bag. The market crashes and the shares (or real estate or tulips or whatever was the focus of the mania) end up being virtually worthless. A great deal of wealth is wiped out in a deflationary collapse.
The stock market is setting up for an almighty crash, as is the US dollar, real estate and eventually the derivatives market. No lender of last resort can bail that out.
Yes, there will be bubbles in the future, as there have been in the past. What you cannot do is time the bubble so that you get out before the crash. That's all that efficient market theory holds -- you can't time markets: day-to-day prices move in a "random walk."
I share your fear that the stock market and other markets may be setting up for an almighty crash. But don't look for any clues in price movements about whether and when that crash will occur. Can't be done.
There has been a very long bull market uptrend, which lasted long enough to morph into a mania. Market timing is forgotten under such circumstances, as is pretty much everything except buy and hold. I'd predict that it will be remembered before the bear market trend has built up too much of a head of steam, but by then the public will no longer be participating to any great extent because it will have lost its collective shirt.
I've seen some very interesting market timing work by Robert Prechter (www.elliottwave.com). There are both quantitative and qualitative aspects to it. I'm agnostic about the quantitative side, although I've seen him be uncannily accurate at times. As I'm not a trader I don't need any great degree of day-to-day precision. The qualitative side is far more interesting as far as I'm concerned. Crudely put, it involves watching where the herd is going, especially when it's almost unanimous, and going in the opposite direction. Given our programming to act collectively, that usually involves a degree of cognitive dissonance. That's where the rationality comes in.
At an extreme of optimism, the next move is probably down (as the lemmings go over the cliff), so withdraw your capital before that happens without waiting to wring every last ounce of profit from the situation. Cashing out early, even very early, is far better than waiting until it's too late. The greater the degree of optimism, the greater the urgency to withdraw from that particular market, because widespread optimism is built on past performance (ie it's late in the trend), not future performance.
A bear market in stocks is conversely a bull market in cash, so stay liquid and watch the value of your cash appreciate against stocks, bonds, commodities, real estate, goods and services (ie deflation). When prices have fallen sufficiently far and everyone else is extremely pessimistic, there will be many investment opportunities available for the capital you will have preserved, although you'll have to climb a mental wall of worry in order to bring yourself to take advantage of them.
The difficulty in the meantime is holding on an ephemeral pile of uncommitted choices (ie cash) while all hell breaks loose around you. Personally, I maintain a stake in the real estate market (ie my small farm) and some commodities (eg my firewood pile) even though I'm convinced the real estate market will crash and remain illiquid for quite some time. I regard it as a consumption item I can afford (ie I didn't have to go into debt to acquire it) rather than as an investment. By making some choices in advance, I am hedging my bets.
Funny, Martha didn't call me with that special [insider] information she had about Imclone.
Out of curiosity...is this anything like spreading the entrails of a dead chicken out on a board?
As we stand at the Peak it is truly a monumental occasion in history.
As we stand here having climbed the biggest mountain in history let us pause a while to remember the great MKH. Although he was able to climb to top of the L48 peak and foresaw us getting to this one, he is not able to share it with us today. As students of the great man and keepers of the PO flame we, seemed to take longer to get here than he expected we would. This was because we took some time out, rested and got diverted along the way.
This is a mighty achievement that would not have been possible without the many people who have made it possible. Let us toast to the engineers and geologists who have made it happen. Your ingenuity seemed to conquer all known limits. Also to the economists who told us nothing could stop us. Records were meant to be broken. Thanks to you both.
As we rest up on these heights, it is now time to rest and enjoy the view. Time to savour the sweet moment before the smog hinders our view and time to begin thinking about the long climb down and possibly the thought of climbing the big one. The monster peak known to all called Abiotica.
So which prediction methodology is more likely to work? Try to study every major oil field in the world, figure out details of how each one is being developed or declining, feed that into an economic model for demand levels, and calculate the difference between these highly uncertain estimates of supply and demand? Or sit back and look at what consensus emerges from people wagering their hard-earned money on the outcome?
I know which way I'd bet - on the people who are betting!
Right now, the market does not believe that the clearing price of oil will rise dramatically. When evidence of an immanent and protracted reduction in supply, i.e., peak oil, presents itself to the market, then you will see an increase in both spot and futures prices. Indeed, if buyers were worried enough, then spot prices could exceed futures prices.
In conclusion, if an individual believes that peak oil will occur, say, next February, but the market does not share that belief, then she should buy futures for next February. But don't look to the futures market to telegraph an early warning about peak oil, because once the markets accept peak oil then the spot price will rise too. There will be no dramatic and visible delta between spot and futures prices.
I am a historian, duly trained and certified, so I can say this with confidence: the future is unknowable. We can't predict exactly when the peak will happen, nor can the geologists, nor can the markets. We'll just have to wait and see.
"So which prediction methodology is more likely to work? Try to study every major oil field in the world, figure out details of how each one is being developed or declining, feed that into an economic model for demand levels, and calculate the difference between these highly uncertain estimates of supply and demand? Or sit back and look at what consensus emerges from people wagering their hard-earned money on the outcome?"
In 2001 the stockmarkets came down unexpected. The consensus then was that the "New Economy" would escape such a fate. People actually lost quite a lot of their hard-earned money. May that, and several stockmarket crashes before 2001, serve as an example of the accuracy of the consensus that emerges from people waging their money.
(Many of these people would say one thing in public and another in private meetings when they were among their fellow insiders; they knew the party wasn't going to last, but as long as someone else was paying for the food and drinks, they didn't complain. The hipocrisy was hip deep.)
In addition to Southsider1's point, it's instructive to look at the historical prices of long-dated crude futures. If the market is truly a predictive instrument, long-dated futures should barely budge in price until current events start to affect the oil demand or supply situation near the contract date.
Therefore, unless there's a change in projected projects for 2009/2010, or some consensus long-term demand forecast radically shifts, a 2010 or 2011 future should not move more than a point or two until a year or so before it expires.
But of course that's not what actually happens. In October 2004 you could buy a December 2010 crude future for $38 a barrel. Several months before that you could buy that same future for $28 a barrel. Currently that future is $54; and in August it was over $62.
On any given day, any two critters can meet up and make up whatever "price" number they want.
Predicting what that noise is going to be is risky business. It is as good as betting on a football game, a hockey game, etc., because on any given day, one team can beat the other despite all the past history. What were the future market's odds USA hockey would win gold in Olympics 1980?
Mother Nature doesn't care about the "price" noises that we human critters make. Those noises are not going to compel Ma Nature to generate new oil down there under (abiotically or otherwise). "Price" is just a distractive noise that obviously has oil peakers all in frenzy and running for the cliffs. Don't fall for it!
Keep your snout securely focused on real production numbers. Peak Of Oil Production rates (POOP) is the real deal. "Price" is an illusion.
Consequently, we might expect the futures market--in perhaps a year's time--to give a good measure of where "we are."
For those of you who are "speculators," your problem is to be slightly ahead of everyone else.
When I saw this graph this was the line that my mind almost immediately fitted to this graph. Let me drop my credentials (B.Sc. Math) first but add I find it bizarre and disturbing that people could make the comment that they see no pattern in this graph. The argument could be made that almost any line could be drawn through this graph to represent the trend. The line I have drawn is, I'm fairly sure, close to what the least squares best fit to that data would be. Of course this line would correspond pretty closely to Deffeyes peak since it is based on essentially the same data...am I wrong here?
If you've worked with predator/prey differential equations, or done statistical analysis, or worked with dynamical systems I think some version of the line I have drawn should be obvious to you.
It would be nice if you could perform a real fit of the logisitic curve to this graph.
If this trend matches with reality there are some conclusions we can drawn: we may see some other local peaks above 72 mdb, but it wont last. In 2006 production will probably stay in the same numbers as in 2005. If not before, 2007 will see the first major fall in worldwide production.
The more I look at it, the more correct Deffeyes seems to be.
In order to fit a logistic curve you need to know precisely the URR for conventionnal oil which varies between 1,750 Gb (ASPO) up to 3,500 Gb (USGS). According to the value you choose, the resulting peak position can shift between now and 2020! a curve fitting approach to infer peak production is an ill-posed problem.
Isn't that what Hubbert's Method is all about?
By the way 1,75 doesn't show anywhere in ASPO's newsletter. They present 1,85 as the URR for Regular Oil (more or less the OGJ data excluding deepwater), which already peaked in 2004.
Let's say that Hubbert got lucky! if you don't have a good estimate of the URR the method is highly imprecise except if you are several years past peak!
You're probably right, they changed their numbers many times! :)
Look man, you don't seem to get it. Hubbert's Method ESTIMATES the URR, that's the beauty of it.
Anyway, if you think that Hubbert was just 'lucky' you're probably in the wrong forum. In order to understand what Peak Oil is I'd recomend you to read some good introduction like
WolfAtTheDoor.
Curve fitting techniques are imprecises, check the following ASPO paper:
Uncertainty in Peak Oil Timing - Marcel Schoppers
Yes you can estimate the URR if you assume that the world production will follow a bell shape curve perfectly! but nobody knows if that hypothesis is valid.
I'll check that article. Still as pointed out before, the logistic curve is the best we have. Also it is something we know to work well in many other fields of geosciences. Let's just say that a Logistic curve is the most natural thing to expect.
But, criticisms of methodology aside, the USGS method at 95% confidence is the one that has actually had any success predicting what has actually been discovered and added recoverable reserves 2000. The USGS 95% model and ASPO are pretty close to one another.
Check out pages 11-13 of this report
In fact, why don't you look at the USGS forecasts for reserve growth from 2000-2005 and compare that to what actually occurred? That's a wonderful sample of how out of touch with reality the USGS is. And Lynch? He's out in orbit somewhere.
This sentiment is something I'd really like to have numbers around, but I'm not really sure where to start. I have the current ASPO production forecast on a big poster, but I would like to overlay it with current and historical forecasts from ASPO, IEA, and USGS before posting it. Is there a way to get these numbers for IEA without buying their expensive reports for every year? Is there any single location for all historical ASPO forecasts? And for USGS I haven't started researching. If these numbers are at your fingertips, it would make my job a lot easier.
However, four years is a very short window to make any long term conclusions. I wonder how significative is this event? one experiment could be to take many random four years wide windows and see how often we observe inflexion points.
If there's one thing attentive economists learn, it's how incredibly risky it is to reach conclusions about such high-level abstractions basd on a single graph.
I believe PO is real and imminent, but I also think that ASPO's 2010 prediction is on the mark. This is based more on faith in their organization and expertise than anything else, but this early in the game, with demand response just shaping up, plus CTL coming into play in the next few years, it seems to me like a safer bet than saying we're at PO now.
As my understanding of calculus is pretty hazy now.What is the rate of increase near the top of the curve? Based on what I can see on the graph of best fit it must be nearly flatling.
Then is is possible to work out an inflection point bsed on this data?
Thanks
Second, the region that Stuart posted could be considered I think, slightly loaded in its intent and got the response it did from me because of it. In addition just by changing the vertical spacing we get this graph:
Which just proves you don't even need statistics to tell any damn lie you want. Plain mathematics will do the job. The first graph might look alarming to the layman while the second wouldn't even though they are the same graph. The story neither of them tell is what effect the predicted shortfall in crude oil might cost and whether that be less SUV sales or widespread chaos and death in some economically undeveloped nation.
Why would anyone consider buying farm land now? I keep hearing that new technology will save the day. Plus the Govt has everything under control. sarcasm off
Cheers,
The second reason not to buy is if the purchase puts you too far into debt to be able to handle adequately as the economy deteriorates.
However, there are still compelling reasons to buy if you can find the right deal.
- It takes years to get a farm established. The soil will almost certainly need to be replenished by the addition of organic matter and growing cover crops.
- If trees (for fruit, nuts, lumber, or firewood) are part of the plan, they need years to get established.
- Unless you're an experienced farmer already, it takes years to learn how to farm.
- You need to get established in the community and build strong relations with your neighbors.
- Setting up a community on the farm is a great option, and it takes years.
In short, it takes a lot of time and effort to establish a farm, so the sooner you start, the sooner you'll be productive. I say this from experience, because my wife and I are in year 3 now and have to date had about $200 of sales at the local farmers' market. We've planted a bunch of fruit trees and bushes but have had only a small amount of fruit for ourselves so far. With the peak of oil production looming, I'm glad we're as far along as we are, but I wish we were further.I agree with you about the real estate bubble and its effects on land prices though. It wouldn't be worth getting into debt in order to buy and overvalued property now. When property prices crash you'd only lose it anyway. Unless you can get a really good deal someow it's better to wait until you can pick it up at 10 cents on the dollar in a few years time. In the meantime you could cash out and stay liquid through the coming deflation in order to have the resources to buy land later.
In July 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, I was a glad-on-tech teenager. I remember Walter Cronkite and all the other "most trusted" names in information-delivery promising us that soon, in this glorious "20th Century" there would be wheel-shaped space stations spinning up there in orbit, generating their own gravity. And mandkind would be off to Mars, Jupiter and beyond. There were no bounds to the glories that this new technology would bring for mankind. On the kiddy-cartoons, George Jetson was whizzing in the air in his flying future car. Rosie the robot was picking up the laundry for Jane, his wife. Elroy was off to summer camp on another planet. The General Electric "bright beautiful tomorrow was just a day away."
Here we are some 35 years later and none of it has come to pass. The trusted Governement does not even trust their own Space Shuttles to hold together during launch. They worry about the Public Relations fiasco should yet another Shuttle blow up on live TV. The herds might lose faith and stop shopping for Christmas, the Christams of Tommy Tomorrow as promised by the Ghost of a Christmas long past.
And that blurb was [my translation]... "production of oil from Lithuanian wells for 2005 is estimated be one-third less than the amount produced in 2004."
So all those stripper wells you see just inland from the coast don't have much of a future... Welcome to the downhill side of the bell curve!
Soon we will have only scrolling blurbs (or ex-suburbs) in America also. As we speak, PBS and CSPAN are being dismantled.
Here is a sneak preview of one of those scrolling, mixed messages:
--from Orwell's "1984" with minor modifications
What is striking to me about the graph is that it stalled out in July 2004, and hasn't gotten significantly above that production in over a year since. Quite clearly, this did not come from some economic issue on the demand side - there was nothing analagous to the Asian flu, or the 2000-2001 tech crash, which caused the last dips in production. Instead, this leveling off in production can only have come from the supply side, and in the face of ongoing industrialization and increasing auto-dependence in China/India etc, in addition to the ongoing continued desire to drive ever more in the OECD countries. This is what has caused the collapse in SUV sales, etc - the demand side is having to respond to the failure of supply to keep increasing.
So if this recent leveling off proves not to be the peak (and I agree that's certainly in the realm of reasonable possibility), the question is who will be increasing in 2006 that has not been able to increase in 2005? The ASPO-Ireland, peak in 2010, answer is obviously deepwater. But I really wonder. With the exception of Brasil (Petrobras), the deepwater stuff is all being developed by the IOCs. After we looked at that Petroleum Review story pointing out that the IOCs are as a group in decline, and we did that Exxon analysis we were inspired to by Andrew "8%" Gould and Kyle Swanson showing that Exxon is just managing (or not quite managing) to keep up with an O(10%) internal decline, I have to wonder if the IOCs can in fact increase production much. The Saudis are flat, the Russians have gone flat...
OTOH, 2005 does seem to be the peak year for new megaprojects, which one might think would help drive a significant production increase in 2006. Certainly if the 2005 crop of projects is not enough to do that, there is much less hope of it in subsequent years.
Any of our resident sceptics want to propose which country/region they favor to be the one to drive 2006 significantly higher?
Finally, is anyone as puzzled as me by these "superspikes"? We've got two spikes of O(2mbd) from one month to the next, with almost as rapid a falloff two months later. That's a hell of a lot of oil production to get turned on and off so fast...
Mother Nature does not automatically pump the oil up for us (with the exceptions of early stage wells). It is a human activity, limited of course by the maximum flow of viscous fluid through porous rock. Humans can toy with the production rate numbers. It's all a matter of meter placement. Do you measure directly at the well head, or do you place your flow meter a bit further downstream on the pipeline? Perhaps after collecting the wellhead flow in a few storage tanks, so you can pretend that the storage tanks are your well heads, and crank their daily output up temporarily or turn them down at will --for purposes of politics and market manipulation?
If industry (including OPEC) believes this chart it would explain their reluctance to increase capacity in the face of what looks to be declining price at least until refinery capacity catches up to crude production, shown in the chart to be mid 2009, again around 88mb/day.
http://www.peakoil.nl/images/ponlreport.pdf
At one time I thought the lack of refinery expansion was due to worries about a lack of supply, but expansion did take place. It may be true that the US has not built a refinery in 29 years, but this is quite misleading. From 1988 to 2000 existing US refineries expanded 29%, or around 2%/year compounded. However, essentially no expansion since, probably on account of the 2000 market crash.
With total surplus capacity gone, refineries are planning expansion, Shell in Texas, 250k/day, and Valero, forget where, 400k/day.
Incidentally, I think refineries were caught by surprise as China and India sharply boosted demand in 03/04. Saudi had excess crude capacity, so was able to fairly quickly bring more crude on line. Meanwhile, it seems refineries did not have as much excess capacity, and it takes longer to expand, explaining the current crunch. However, there is not yet any indication that they are reluctant to expand to meet demand, providing of course permits are forthcoming.