Here is a key fact that casts doubt on the official reporting: When the industry and the government talk about the price of oil sold on world markets and traded on futures exchanges, they mean one thing. But, when they talk about the total production of oil, they actually mean something quite different--namely, a much broader category that includes all kinds of things that are simply not oil and that could never be sold on the world market as oil.

Basically, crude oil peaked [in 2005], but natural gas and natural gas liquids [including lease condensate] didn't," he believes. Natural gas production has continued to grow, and as it has, its coproducts have also grown--many of which have been lumped in with the oil production statistics

So, if oil production hasn't really been growing or at least not growing much in the last several years, what's all the hoopla about? As petroleum geologist and consultant Art Berman likes to say, it's a retirement party. There is one last, very difficult, costly and energy-intensive store of oil in low-quality deep shales containing crude. These shales--which are accessed using hydraulic fracturing or fracking--would never have been tapped if we were not already seeing a decline in the production of conventional, easy-to-get crude oil.

Despite what the public is being led to believe, oil wells in deep shales suffer from very high annual production decline rates--40 percent per year compared to the worldwide average of 4 percent. This implies that swiftly rising production will be followed by equally swiftly declining production in a compressed time frame--a classic boom-bust pattern.

Okay, so what do the worldwide oil production numbers actually look like if we strip out all the non-oil components?

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The reason for the seeming stall in world oil production is actually quite simple. The remaining oil is harder to extract. We've taken the easy oil out of the Earth first. He explains that in the seven years ending in 2005, the oil industry invested $1.5 trillion on finding and developing new oil and natural gas fields and the capacity to refine and distribute the products that come from them. During that period oil production consistently rose. In the seven years after 2005 the industry spent $3.5 trillion for no net increase in the production rate of actual, honest-to-god crude oil

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2014/0416/Has-crude-oil-production-already-peaked

Another chart

http://www.theenergycollective.com/energy-post/2381873/why-oil-prices-are-going-up-and-will-continue-to-go-up