Actually, he didn't assume anything on the demand side.
There is a curve for each field, as well as for countries and the world. It just shows how much, and how fast, you can get oil out of a field, and is based on the size of the reservoir. What it says is that production can increase over time, until the reservoir is roughly 50% depleted. After that, the production will decline, no matter what you do.
If, for example, Ghawar was pumping at 2MBPD instead of 4.5, we would see production rise to a plateau and stay there for many years, rather than seeing a bell curve. But, we would also observe, at some future date, a decline from that plateau, once the field was about 50% depleted.
Here's an article about Cantarell; thought to be depleting at 40% right now. Tertiary extraction techniques (horizontal drilling) has been around for about 10 years; no new 4th generation techniques have yet been discovered; secondary recovery is pumping in water or a gas...
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As far as the supply side, the world has been pretty well picked over, except in the polar regions and the deep oceans, like maybe the Mariannas Deep. The elephant fields, the big ones, get discovered and tapped first. Recent discoveries just aren't big enuf to make more than a blip on the curve. For example, the highly touted Jack may produce 400KBPD in 2013; Saudia Arabia production fell by 500KBPD between Jan and July; by the time Jack comes on line, it's just a bump on the downslope.
The life of an oil reservoir
theoildrum.com
Pumping too much too fast can render a field unusuable.
In February 2005, Matthew Simmons speculated that the Saudis may have damaged their giant oilfields by over-producing them in the past: a geological phenomenon known as "rate sensitivity". In oilfields where the oil is pumped too hard, the structure of the oil reservoir can be impaired. In bad cases, most of a field's oil can be left stranded below ground, essentially unextractable. "If Saudi Arabia has damaged its fields, accidentally or not," Simmons said, "then we may already have passed peak oil."
(A long, but very good article)
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