How published oil reserves figures confuse the oil supply situation

I occasionally read commentaries which imply that there is no concern about global oil supply because the world has huge global oil reserves. We know that because huge, and growing, reserves figures are published in World Oil and Oil and Gas Journal, which then make their way into the mainstream media.

While those figures are published in respected oil industry journals, the figures are essentially worthless. No outside agency audits oil reserves for individual countries. Since there is no outside auditing, governments of many countries exaggerate their reserves figures. Also, multiple countries don

There is no one definition used for oil reserves so different countries use whatever definition suits their purposes. That leads to a confusing mishmash of data that has no coherent meaning.

A better way to assess what is going on in terms of global oil supply is to observe the decline curves of countries in which production is declining as well as the cumulative production and estimated ultimate recovery values for countries that haven