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!