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In other words supply may outrun demand but it is all the fault of those nasty mean foreigners.
They also seem to accept the figures of the UK Offshore Operators Association (p83) that UK continental shelf oil and gas production will be 3.2 million barrels of oil equivalent per day this year and rise to 3.4 in 2007. the latest DTI statistics show the April 7.391 million tonnes of oil production and 7.495 million tonnes oil equivalent of natural gas production. By my calculations that is 2.74 million barrels of oil equivalent.
Buzzard is the only sizable new field due to come online in the next couple of years and it is predicted to produce 0.18 to 0.19 mbpd barrels of oil by mid 2007. How this is expected in less than a year to offset decline in other fields running at present at about 0.25 mbpd and produce an increase of 0.2 mbpd beats me.
Of course it's not hard to see why - early cost recovery for operator, early tax revenue for Gov't and production will occur during the (now limited) lifespan of key infrastructure i.e. Forties and Frigg oil / gas gathering systems respectively. Major NS infrastructure dating from 1970's will soon be approaching end of design life for the corrosive environment and average size of new discoveries would be unlikely to justify such repeat investments.
Clearly Buzzard peak rate cannot be maintained for very long thus, after a couple of years or so UK NS oil production will show an even steeper decline curve following a 'blip' on the downslope as Buzzard is commissioned.
Like Nick I cannot see where the 'rise to 3.4m boe/d in 2007' is coming from - Energy Trends has just reported an 8.5% oil and 4.5% gas decline in 12 months 1Qr 2005 to 1Qr 2006. From this report I've calculated the declines as 155.4k bopd (oil) and 94.4k boe/d (gas) i.e 249.8k boe/d in total. Even if Buzzard peaks at 190k bopd within 12 months of startup combined energy output from NS for that year would still decline.
It gets worse. The monthly figures at the DTI give the decline for the latest 3 months for which they have figures, (Feb-Apr 2006) over the corresponding three months of 2005 as 10% decline in petroleum and 7.6% in natural gas.