…THE IMPENDING OIL CRISIS… PICK OIL…? EVERYTHING ISN’T SO BAD.

Undiscovered world hydrocarbon reserves are too far from depletion. For example, the world’s second largest discovery in the past 20 years occurred at Brazil's Tupi field, in November, 2007. Estimated recoverable reserves could reach eight billion barrels. Some early was discovered Sugar Loaf field (25-40 billion barrels).
Swiss-based Manas Petroleum stated that a resource evaluation in north-western Albania had assigned 2.987 billion barrels of oil with 3.014 trillion cubic feet of associated gas.
Oil contents of the US Outer Continental Shelf estimates as about 19 billion barrels and so on.
There are many large undiscovered oil fields (perhaps 40-50%).
Problem is in low success rate in exploration wells.
According to industry figures the rate for the North Sea now are approximately 25%. In other words only one well is successful in four drilled. It significantly brakes industry growing.
However there is a Binary Seismo-Electromagnetic (BSE) technology, which uses new physical mechanism for creation the direct response from hydrocarbon deposits. It can significantly mitigate statistic data cited above because BSE success rate is more then 75% for wildcats with discovering commercial pays. Or to put it another way, failure rate is 25% only (one well in four drilled). So, new method is at least in three (3) times more effective then conventional methods. The BSE survey can find and outline at list 75% of all reserves in any region before any drilling is done or it can add 25-30% reserves in old provinces. www.binaryseismoem.weebly.com

Hmm, I'm not sure that an ocean of oil on the moon would qualify as a Black Swan. At least not the simple discovery. Taleb gives 3 requirements for a Black Swan:

1) Must be an outlier (tick)
2) Must have an extreme impact (unless and until we could actually make use of such a discovery it would be unlikely to have much impact outside of the scientific curiousity of such an unexpected discovery)
3) Concoct explanation after the fact making it explainable and predictable (I haven't fully groked this part of his theory. I see how it applies to some of the events he calls Black Swans but not others)

I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about his theories and one question I've been turning over in my head is: Can the same event be both a Black Swan to those who didn't see it coming and a Grey/White Swan for those who did? From his book (paraphrased)

"If you know the stock market can crash as it did in 1987 then such an event is not a Black Swan. Not an outlier if you use a fractal with exponent of 3. Some black swans arise because we ignore sources of randomness. Others arise when we overestimate the fractal exponent. Grey swan concerns modelable extreme events, a black swan is about unknown unknowns."

So in my mind that makes peak oil, the current financial turmoil and Hurricane Katrina all Grey Swans. At least to those who believed the models and predictions. But were the same events Black Swans to a whole bunch of people who didn't see them coming? In an interview last year Steven Colbert titled his segment with Taleb, 'Schrödinger's Swan' which I thought was brilliant. It's only Black if you can't see it, otherwise it's Grey...