by coyote » Sat 26 Nov 2005, 04:13:55
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'R')eserves are up
Not everyone agrees that oil production is nearing a peak. "I don't think the evidence is there," said Daniel Yergin, founder of Massachusetts-based Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
His team of geologists and petroleum engineers has done an oil field-by-oil field analysis and concluded that world oil production capacity will increase by nearly 20 percent between 2004 and 2010, and that since the 1990s discoveries of new oil reserves have exceeded production.
Yergin, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1991 book chronicling the history of the oil industry, said he supports the search for more fuel-efficient technologies. But since the 1990s, he argued, the world has "added more oil [reserves] than has been produced."
Since 1990 the world has added more oil reserves than has been produced? What?
This is the kind of statement that just confuses me. Plenty of other geologists are saying that we are now using 2 to 4 barrels for every barrel found. We've all seen the charts. Yet here is Yergin saying the opposite. Where does this tremendous discrepancy come from, and how is a poor non-scientist like myself supposed to come to anything resembling an informed opinion? Is it just that Yergin and his team are ignoring the backdating of reserves discoveries that Campbell and others go on about? If so, how could this Pulitzer Prize winner fall into such a simple trap?
If anyone has suggestions for how to make sense out of all the information and misinformation (as some of it must be) out there, please let me know. Something other than "Dude, you don't really believe that guy, do you?" I don't believe him or disbelieve him. I would like to know which experts are supplying the believable analyses. They all seem to disagree with each other, not just over conjectures but over numbers which should be verifiable, one way or the other. TIA