In the dark over oil reserves

There is a perverse circular logic to George Osborne using tax revenues from the oil companies to subsidise our national car habit. It may worsen long-term energy security, obstruct the shift to a low-carbon economy and leave us vulnerable to uncontrollable global events, but it makes short-term political sense to the government. Just how big […]

Oil found in Uruguay

Executives at state-owned ANCAP told Efe Thursday that the company had discovered the first traces of oil in Uruguay, a country that depends on imported crude for 60 percent of its energy. “For the first time in Uruguay’s history, free oil has been found in small proportions, emanating from the bedrock,” Juan Gomez, member of […]

Oil Will Be Gone in 50 Years: HSBC

There could be less than 49 years of oil supplies left, even if demand were to remain flat according to HSBC’s senior global economist Karen Ward. “Energy resources are scarce,” Ward said in a research note. “Even if demand doesn’t increase, there could be as little as 49 years of oil left.” “Gas is less […]

Thoughts on Oil & the Middle East

A book that I have read and highly recommend is Twilight in the Desert by Matthew Simmons, who was a Houston-based analyst and investment banker in the energy field for several decades. He died last year.  He is best known for championing the ‘Peak Oil’ thesis, which was first broached by M. King Hubbert, a […]

Jim Berkland – A Major Earthquake in North America Imminent

Earthquake forecaster Jim Berkland warns of a ‘high risk’ seismic window and potential for a massive quake poised to strike somewhere in North America in between the dates of March 19th and 26th. Berkland points to the recent mass fish die-off at King Harbor near Redondo Beach as a harbringer of a potential catastrophic quake […]

5 Theories Why We’re Experiencing Increased Earthquake Activity

Planet Earth has experienced a very noticeable up-tick in earthquake activity and intensity over the last five years. Leading up to the great Japan quake, we’ve witnessed the utter devastation from the 2004 Indian Ocean megathrust earthquake and tsunami, the catastrophic Haiti quake, an axis-moving Chile quake in 2010, massive and multiple quakes in New […]

Geologists Say California Quake May Be Next

“Newsweek reports that first there was a violent magnitude-8.8 event in Chile in 2010, then a horrifically destructive Pacific earthquake in New Zealand on February 22, and now the recent earthquake in Japan. Though there is still no hard scientific evidence to explain why, there is little doubt now that earthquakes do tend to occur […]

Western China the ‘Middle East’ for coal?

Western China’s vast coal reserves could make it the “new Middle East,” a top coal industry official said. In an interview published Tuesday in The Guardian newspaper, Fred Palmer, chairman of the World Coal Association and a key executive at Peabody Energy, the world’s largest privately owned coal company, dismissed the prospect that the world […]

Michael Lynch: Just how vast are Saudi Aramco Reserves?

WikiLeaks trove of diplomatic dispatches continue to trickle out. A recent release has excited the the “peak oil” theorists because it suggests that Saudi Aramco reserves are overstated by 40% and production may collapse. The Saudi official estimate of proved reserves is  267 barrels. Over  the decades, recovery factors have advanced from 10% to 35% […]

Acknowledging Peak Oil, featuring Sadad al-Husseini

Five leading petroleum industry experts discuss the major production challenges posed by oil depletion. While new fields are being discovered, the steady pace of depletion, a growing world population, and diminished investment in new exploration and production point to a constrained world oil supply in the next few years. This video features Sadad al-Husseini, Jeremy […]

Saudi Arabia and Peak Oil

Recently, Wikileaks made a lot of news by making public a large number of cables and correspondence between various governments and their agencies. While most of the focus from the media has been on revelations pointing mostly to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and other diplomatic shenanigans), there were also some interesting revelations that directly affect […]

Understanding Peak Oil – “When Giants Run Dry” From Jim Puplava

I came across an article that explains the concept of peak oil production much better than I ever could. The article was written by Jim Puplava who I’ve previously listened to on webcasts interviewing other Peak Oil Cassandras like Matt Simmons, Robert Hirsch and Jeff Rubin. I think the key things to pay attention to […]

Have Saudis Overstated How Much Oil Is Left?

While the world remains transfixed by the Egyptian revolt, a crisis with equally profound global consequences is quietly brewing elsewhere in the Middle East: WikiLeaks this week released U.S. diplomatic cables suggesting that Saudi Arabia may have vastly overstated its oil reserves — if true, that could dramatically accelerate the arrival of the long-feared “peak […]

Digging out the truth about Saudi oil

A senior Saudi Arabian oil official said in 2007 that the kingdom has 388 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil reserves, about 45 percent more than official public estimates. But about the same time, a retired Saudi Aramco executive met with U.S. diplomats in Dhahran, and asserted that Saudi figures in general are wildly overblown, […]

Saudi Oil Production and Reserves – Reasons Behind Wikileaks Concerns

Saudi Arabia tells us that they have lots of oil, but if we look at graphs of their historical production, there is nothing that looks like an upward trend. In fact, recent production is lower than it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This is a graph of Saudi oil production, consumption, and […]

WikiLeaks cables: Saudi Arabia cannot pump enough oil to keep a lid on prices

The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show. The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom’s crude oil reserves […]

OPEC´s Oil Reserve Revisionism

What’s with OPEC member’s recent oil reserve revisionism? First Venezuela, then Iraq, followed closely by Iran, and then again by Venezuela, in anticipation of further upgrades from Kuwait and Iraq. Does Saudi Arabia still hold the world’s biggest reserves? Not according to Venezuela. And is there more oil in Iraq than in Iran? Or will […]

Peak Not: Running Into Oil and Gas

“Resources are highly dynamic functional concepts; they are not, they become, they evolve out of the triune interaction of nature, man, and culture.”[0] So said the institutional economist Erich Zimmermann, explaining why so-called fixed, depletable resources expand rather than deplete in free market settings. Julian Simon similarly stated: “Human beings create more than they destroy.”[2] […]

Where the oil is: 6 huge untapped fields

Alarms about peak oil are still sounding in certain circles, but the world, for now, is still awash in petroleum. There are many oil reserves around the globe that remain untapped, and explorers continue to discover new fields deep beneath the earth’s surface. Depending on how the controversy surrounding the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge turns […]

Oil: into new frontiers

Massive new reserves have been identified, proven up, and brought to production – whilst reserves previously considered impossible to reach are now no more than a horizontal drilling or steam injection technique away. All this should help ensure supply can meet global demand for far longer than was expected just a few years ago – […]

The Oil Drum Reviews: BP Energy Outlook to 2030

There is a significant reliance, among those who write on fossil fuels, on the statistics that BP annually compile on global energy production. For example it provides underlying information for Energy Export Databrowser, as well as many of the posts at The Oil Drum. And so when BP just released their forecast for energy for […]

Peak Oil: The Basics of Oil Depletion in 5 minutes

This essential information summarizes Peak Oil through interviews with Richard Heinberg, Paul Roberts, Gerald Cecil, Otis Graham, Jeremy Rifkin, James Howard Kunstler, Jerry Mander, and a cameo from Jimmy Carter. According to many sources, oil production stagnated in 2005 resulting in increasing oil prices. World economic growth now struggles to match the limitations of crude […]

Venezuela Says Oil Reserves Surpass Saudi Arabia’s

Venezuela has overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world leader in oil reserves with certified deposits leaping to 297 billion barrels at the end of 2010, President Hugo Chavez’s government said Saturday. Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez told Reuters that the new reserves, which pushed the total 41 percent higher than the previous year, were booked in […]

Norway cuts 4.4 bln barrels from oil/gas reserves

Norway slashed its undiscovered oil and gas resource estimate by 4.4 billion barrels and forecast a 5.8 percent drop in oil output in 2011 as exploration results disappoint and North Sea oilfields mature. The downgrade, expected after exploration wells spudded in prospective gas areas in the Norwegian Sea missed industry expectations, comes at a time […]

40 Years Worth of Light Sweet US Oil Supply

Although it can not be argued that peak oil will not occur, a more meaningful discussion may be to determine when it will occur. That will allow for the investment in alternative sources for energy, much like Portugal and Denmark have done;where they are on target to meet 30% of national energy needs from renewable […]

Saudi Aramco says world has 14trn barrels of crude but are mostly inaccessible

New technology in the future could boost the world’s proven oil resources by nearly two trillion barrels but more than five times of these quantities could remain inaccessible, according to Saudi Aramco Speaking at a seminar in Riyadh, Buraik said the quantity of oil extracted so far worldwide does not exceed one trillion barrels. “Advanced […]

Largest natural gas reserve discovered in Israel

The reserve, Leviathon, is the largest amount of natural gas discovered in the world in the last decade and is located in approximately 5,400 feet (1,645 meters) of water, about 130 kilometers offshore of Haifa and 29 miles (47 kilometers) southwest of the Tamar discovery. Last year, Israeli company Isramco announced that reserves of natural […]

CNN: Global oil reserves

Global oil reserves 2:13 CNN’s Guillermo Arduino takes a look at where the world’s oil is coming from.

Ken Deffeyes: Gauging how much oil there is

In 2001, building on the geologist M. King Hubbert’s prediction that U.S. oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970, Kenneth S. Deffeyes, emeritus professor of geology at Princeton University, predicted in his book “Hubbert’s Peak” that world oil production would peak in 2005. “I’ve been a Hubbertian since the late 1950s,” Mr. Deffeyes writes. […]

Colombia defies “peak oil” but for how long?

Half a century ago, Colombia helped plant the first inklings of a theory that became known as “peak oil” — the idea that conventional oil extraction has crested. Today, Latin America’s No. 4 crude producer is defying expectations by increasing its output. But experts say the Andean country must now find new reserves to keep […]

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