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GAIA Host Collective
hothgor, a company can defer reserves ( and taxes) into the future but really probably only for a year or so.
you state that techniques for estimating field size , and reserves, have vastly improved from the 60's. well maybe somewhat, but if that is true then can we count on the same reserve growth in the future ? much of reserve estimation is based on decline curve analysis so that hasn't changed since the 60's (although i dont have first hand knowledge of the 60's since i have only been doing this since the '70's)
The only reason for reserves to NOT increase in size as they have in the past is for us to discount all possible technological innovations. Not only that, but a good junk of the oil we find today is still by these same oil companies who routinely under-estimate the size of a field for the above mentioned reasons.
well, inovations may happen and they may not but you are talking about two different things here, technical innovations and political/tax/investor relations .
i can agree with you that most of the reservoir engineers of the 50's and 60's were crew cut and pocket protector wearing, slide rule wielding conservative who didnt want to ever over estimate reserves. they werent worried about being wrong by being too conservative. and i suppose exxon, chevron and bp are still in that mode to some extent.
arent ceo's today more worried about the value of their stock options and thus aren't their suv driving suburb living windows operating compliant reservoir engineers more likely to over rather than under estimate reserves ?
that and i think you are way too impressed with this whiz bang technology, with the exception of computers we are doing things largly as the crew cut wearing ones did.
Hothgor.
Reserves and Reserve growth:
The proof of a pudding is in the eating.
Explain how you square reserve growths against year on year reductions in Flows from specific, countries, regional basins and component fields.
And anyway where are the reserve growths of which you speak?
The lower 48, Alaska, UKCS and Norway have pretty good data for you to work on.
All, it would seem, are suffering reduced flows.
We are talking about the good stuff here: Cheap, easily extracted, light sweet crude.
You know. The stuff that has powered the planet for 60 years. Forget the sub-oil shales, tar sands and ethanol as important components in the Liquids flow levels. For sure, count the high sulpher heavy oils and other sludges that are still found in conventional geological formations and traps etc but need more energy to extract.
I cannot understand why this is such a big conceptual problem.
Maybe kids spend too much time playing on computers and not enough time playing at the sink with different sizes of cups and buckets and water.
The largest force towards reserve growth in the present day comes from economic incentives. It simply was not attractive to recover hydrocarbons from certain fields at the price level we averaged from the late 80s to the early 90s. Today, with oil most likely going to hover between $50 and $70, that allows a much larger range of hydrocarbon utilization, both conventional and unconventional. At some point in the future, the unconventional sources will be the new conventional.
Mooooo!
US Population 1970 213 million (1980 239 million)
US Population 2006 300 million
UP @48%
imported oil 1976 @30%
imported oil 2006 @60%
UP 100%
(not including manufactured imports, and the oil needed to build)
...and I should be excited by reserve growth?