Big oil discoveries

The activities of the Chinese oil group in Sudan have fuelled calls for Mr Buffett to dump Berkshire Hathaway’s $3.1bn stake in PetroChina. The latter’s latest discovery off China, said to hold reserves of perhaps 7.5bn barrels of oil equivalent, might conceivably convince its political masters that they do not need to go drilling near Darfur to feed the economic boom back home.

That is pretty unlikely. Still, the news from Bohai Bay should reopen the debate on whether the world is running out of oil and gas


In certain respects, peak-oil theorists have a lot of data on their side. Giant fields