[Quinny]

I'd done it already, if Oily could clarify how many months of 2009 his data represents, we could always add another column.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TheDude', '[')img]http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/7317/of2.png[/img]

That really clears things up. You could toss in regions/nations/continents and whatever you please, if you had the time.

What it takes to make a chart:

OpenOffice .org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite. Free, open source. Graph wizard walks you through everything, most data from EIA requires no modification.

Take screen shot of results and paste into IrfanView or the like - I prefer this program because it's simple, loads fast, etc. Crop graph, save as .png or .gif file for low resolution stuff like this. Host at Imageshack or Photobucket or whatever. Use thumbnails whenever possible to save on their bandwidth. Not rocket science.

AAPG discoveries for 2006. Lists included, feel free to compare and contrast, again, if you have the time for such stuff.

What The Dude is reading at the moment: Amazon.com: The Myth of the Oil Crisis: Overcoming the Challenges of Depletion, Geopolitics, and Global Warming: Robin M. Mills: Books. Cornucopia on display. My take is that all that oil will come out of the ground if everything else falls into place as well, i.e., no dictators in major producing nations seizing assets of service companies indiscriminately, no ex-Soviet regions holding up development plans on huge fields over and over again, etc. And what a wonderful world that would be, to quote Sam Cooke.

Can't for the life of me understand why these guys keep going on about reserve growth in regions that are in irreversible decline. He has terminal cancer, but hey, that sneeze is gone!

[shortonsense]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('eXpat', '.') Create the OilFinder2 model, so anybody can see it. Put your money where your mouth is.

[copious.abundance]

Thank you TheDude.

I just didn't feel like making a chart. Chalk it up to laziness, if you will.

In the past I have thought of mapping these discoveries (since I do GIS for a living, that would be fairly easy to do), with variable-sized circles or something like that - that would be nice to see. But I'd first have to enter them into a shapefile (a GIS data type, for those who don't know), then pluck down the points on a map of the world. It would be a cool idea, but I'm not sure I'll ever get around to it.

As for Quinny's comment about 2009, these discoveries are not announced at a uniform rate through the year, so I don't think extrapolating the current running total to the whole year would be valid. If Petrobras announces a 20 billion barrel discovery in December, that would throw any earlier 2009 extrapolation out the window.