Big Oil Strike in Brazil has Tongues Wagging, but We Continue Towards Peak Oil

The world press, especially the Western press and specifically the financial press, has jumped all over the headlines of the discovery of a huge oil field in Brazil’s continental shelf.

Naturally, if verified, it would be the greatest discovery in several decades and would skew, to a certain extent, the observed tendency toward a steady but inexorable decline in the volume of the world’s discovered petroleum, while worldwide consumption continues its relentless increase.
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The imminent arrival of peak oil production will be the first historical moment in which fuel production diminishes, globally and without remission. There will be no corner of the world left to explore and provide hope of further production, or in any case, to bridge the growing gap between growing demand and shrinking supply.

For this reason, the discovery of a “gigafield,” a gigantic oilfield in Brazil, has brought recriminating, or at least condescending glances at the ASPO scientists, in the sense that much more remains to be discovered and that their predictions, categorized by many as “catastrophic,” were wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth. A “gigafield,” according to the definition of those who coined the term, is a field that has between 500 million and a billion barrels of oil, from which a flow of at least 1 million barrels a day can be extracted.

ASPO has always asserted that the world’s oil resource supply has not been completely discovered. In general terms and with the profound knowledge that has come from more than 150 years of scientific exploratory activity, much has been learned. Exploratory technology has improved considerably, and geologists and geophysicists know with a fair amount of accuracy which areas may have “possibilities” (prospects) where money can be directed at exploration, although there may be rare exceptions that simply confirm the rule. ASPO says that it believes that a figure of around 10% of all petroleum discovered so far and classified as proven reserves, remains to be discovered.

Given that the proven reserves are around 2 billion barrels, of which 1 billion has already been extracted, if the latest discovery in Brazil proves to be confirmed, we would be talking about approximately 6% of what remains to be discovered; although calculating an exact number is an exercise in futility. What matters are the orders of magnitude of the known major oil deposits around the world; an order of magnitude impossible to escape.

An extensive analysis from AlterNet