Discovered this recently: The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas and thought I'd share it with y'all.

The page contains all of this group's monthly newsletters, thirty nine in all. They also assess a different country's oil reserves each month. Iraq's assesment was done before the war, but it does provides some background to the current re-developement of Iraq's oil fields.

I've only skimmed a couple of these. The most interesting thing so far is the discussion of proven oil reserve reporting by companies (#326, in March 2004 and countries (#330, also in March 2004).

The science of oil reserve calculation and reporting is very complicated. And those calculations are complicated by recovery percentages during production. Oil resevoirs are touchy things. Still, there seems to be some strange things going on here.

While the writing is quite folksy at times, as far as I can tell, these people know this topic a hell of alot better than I do. There is also tons of data here, both on discovery and production numbers. Wish their graphs were a little bit larger, though.

I've just purchased The Oil Factor. Just getting into it, kinda gloomy for a spring read.