There's a number we should all write down and carry in our wallets: 106 million. That's how many barrels of oil we'll need to produce every day in 2028 according to the IEA. And if the market is this tight when we're only consuming 86 million barrels per day, I'm scared to think where we'll be in seven years.

In recent years however, as world oil production has stagnated, and as more attention was focused on rates of oil depletion vs. the likelihood of offsetting new production, the IEA's basic premise became more and more untenable. This year the Agency succumbed to reality and addressed the issue of stagnating oil production head-on with detailed discussions of oil depletion around the world.