ckaupp,

Yours is actually a very good question, and I am in agreement with you, that one hears estimates all over the place. And, as you described yourself, I too know little about exploration. Some themes seem to be recurrent however:

--The independent oil companies of the West have less and less area that they are allowed to explore firsthand, due to the energy nationalism of various state controlled oil companies, and other prohibitions. They are trying to look for more and more oil in a smaller and smaller area of the planet. This is most pronounced in the OPEC/Persian Gulf region, and in Russia, places that the oil companies had hoped in years gone by to be included, but are now being excluded. One can presume a similiar fate in Latin America for many of the Western oil companies, as these nations become more and more nationalistic

---There are areas in which the oil companies have done no real exploration for a very long time, because they have not been allowed to drill, and if they found oil there, they would not be allowed to harvest. Various areas in the U.S. West and the OCS (Outer Continental Shelf) of the U.S. come to mind. Again, the estimates of how much oil is there are widely varied, from barely a couple of years worth of production up to the hopes for a new North Sea. No one really knows, and only drilling at least in selected spots can tell.

---Of great interest are (a) Offshore Africa and (b) Arctic. Efforts now seem underway, but there are large areas in each region that have had little real exploration. Why?

It is easy to forget that after 1982, and for a subsequent 20 years or so, no one spent money in the oil business doing much exploration, because they were too busy fighting for their financial lives. This was the period of the greatest price collapse in oil from it's prior top in history, and most effort was expended on mergers in the oil business, as the remaining oil companies in the U.S. tried to survive. People now seem absolutely astounded that exploration and discovery dropped off! With cheap oil flowing from the Persian Gulf and the North Sea, who was willing to pull money off the table to explore oil that would then be sold at a givaway price? Would you have endorsed exploration in that environment as an oil company shareholder?

I do want to mention one more thing: Many have mentioned the move by the oil companies into very deep offshore ocean drilling as proof that they simply cannot find oil onshore. There may well be some truth in that, but it is not the whole story. The private oil companies are being driven offshore by lack of anywhere to even look onshore. Once you take out the areas forbidden to drill for environmental reasons (and I am not faulting that, but it is simply a fact of life for them) and take out the areas onshore controlled by nationalist or hostile parties, you see a smaller and smaller piece of the Earth available onshore for the oil companies to drill. There is some debate as to whether the major private oil companies of the West can survive into the future given the situation as it is, and it will surely become more difficult for them with each passing year. Going out to deep water is becoming the only game in town.

What the above situation means to the world is that it is becoming more and more dependent on the willingness and the competence of the state owned oil companies to explore for oil and gas, and find it if it is there.

But, do we know how much is left to be discovered? No. We certainly do not.

Roger Conner Jr.

Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom, and that cubic mile could be hiding just about anywhere!