The growing conflicts in and about oil exporting regions and speculations about volatile oil prices during the last decade have renewed the public interest in predictions for the near future oil production and consumption. Unfortunately, studies from only 10 years ago, which tried to forecast the oil production during the next 20-30 years, failed to make accurate predictions for todays global oil production and consumption. Forecasts using economic growth scenarios, overestimated the actual oil production, while models which tried to estimate the maximum future oil production/year, using the official country oil reserve data, predicted a too low production. In this paper, a new approach to model the maximal future regional and thus global oil production (part I) and consumption (part II) during the next decades is proposed. Our analysis of the regional oil production data during past decades shows that, in contrast to periods when production was growing and growth rates varied greatly from one country to another, remarkable similarities are found during the plateau and decline periods of different countries. Following this model, the particular production phase of each major oil producing country and region is determined essentially only from the recent past oil production data. Using these data, the model is then used to predict the production from all major oil producing countries, regions and continents up to the year 2050. The limited regional and global potential to compensate this decline with unconventional oil and oil-equivalents is also presented.
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