2005 Exploration Round-Up
Posted by Bubba on March 1, 2006 - 6:45am
First of all, my reading of the data, plus my own personal experience leads me to discern the following themes: Deeper water, deeper reservoirs, smaller discoveries, more gas, less oil.
Over a third of all discovered volumes from 2005 came from deepwater basins. Of the three most significant deepwater basins from an oil-production perspective - the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of Guinea of the coast of West Africa, and offshore Brazil - deeper water and deeper reservoirs are definite themes. Exploration wells in the GOM are commonly being drilled in water depths greater than 9000 ft with total well depths greater than 30,000 ft. Exploration well costs are running up to and over $100 million per well (with daily deepwater rig rates running upwards of $500,000 per day). Currently ExxonMobil is in the midst of drilling the renowned Blackbeard West well. This well is being drilled in shallow water off the coast of Louisiana with a prognosed TD of greater than 30,000 ft. Rumors have it that the well cost was already over $100 million with 9,000 ft remaining to drill.
Smaller discoveries
No truly significant discoveries were reported in 2005. There were no billion barrel (or barrel equivalent gas fields) announced in 2005. Even more ominous, IHS reports that potentially producible volumes from world discoveries in 2004 and 2005 were the lowest recorded since WWII. Overall they report 4.5 billion barrels of oil and 32 TCFG from 320 discoveries worldwide for 2005. As a comparison, 4.5 billion barrels of oil is a 53 day supply of the world's oil usage.
Some of the more notable discoveries include Knotty Head in the deepwater GOM (GC 512) which has had some speculation that it could contain 500 million barrels of recoverable oil.
Angola's Deepwater Block 31 had 5 discoveries that combined are estimated to contain over 600 MMBO of oil.
And not strictly in 2005, but in January of 2006 Lukoil reported a Caspian discovery (Y-Rakushechnaya) containing and estimated 600 million barrel equivalent of oil and gas.
More gas, less oil
Shwe Phyu 2 in Myanmar is a gas discovery that has a reported 650 million barrel equivalent of recoverable gas. Elsewhere, some big gas discoveries in Australia (Pluto 1, Caldita 1), gas discovered off eastern India in the deepwater portion of the Krishna-Godavari basin, also sizeable finds were reported in Iran, China, and Peru
Emerging plays and other areas
In Brazil a newly emerging play involves drilling through and below the Aptian-age salt in the Santos Basin to test potential oil or gas reservoirs below the salt. As usual in Brazil, Petrobras is leading the charge, but Exxon, Shell, Statoil, British Gas and others are involved as well. This is extreme wildcat exploration, no with reported discoveries to date. The companies involved in this play are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on something that may turn out to be a complete dud.
In the GOM most of the action continued to be in the eastern and western Paleogene play and the Miocene structure play below salt. The Paleogene has had a lot of action with billions of barrels of oil discovered in place, but the combination of extreme deepwater, deep reservoirs, low permeability, and undesirable fluids has left oil companies scratching their heads about what to do with all of these barrels in the ground.
In Europe I would characterize the 2005 results as more of the same - a couple of small (less than 100 MMBO) oil discoveries in the UK portion of the North Sea, with some sizeable gas finds in the Norway portion of the North Sea.
So to answer some of the questions above - who won and who lost in 2005. None of the IOC's appear to be big winners. Of the 9 discoveries reported to be greater than 100 million BOE, the operators include BP, Woodside, Daewoo, Shell, Lukoil, ONGC, ConocoPhillips, Unocal, and Gujarat SPC.
Overall I would say we are all losers. More money chasing smaller volumes in more and more difficult areas. The remaining unexplored areas of the world are fewer and fewer. Not a lot of smiley faces here.
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In 2005 for each barrel of oil founded we consumed six and a half. Like prof. Bakhtiari says oil reserves accounting is now a thing of the past.
1 : 6.5, oh well, business as usal.
Or maybe I'm already too depressed to be affected further.
best, Dave
All the people who bitch about how "people won't conserve energy" are in for a shock. The major shift in the US car market away from trucks is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg.
As far as people "bitching" about "people won't conserve energy" goes, I agree--what else are they going to do? But this too will take some transition time. It won't happen overnight. I take it you're not a big believer in Jevon's Paradox.
But geopolitical oil shocks are the wildcard. And anyone with a functioning brain and a little imagination will have little trouble thinking up disasters that could happen. If that Al-Qaeda attempt at Abqaiq hadn't been such an amateur job, this week would be very different than it is.
This is highly significant, because all the old econoboxen used as winter cars could easily become primary vehicles overnight. The guzzling trucks that people commute in today could wind up parked most of the time. What difference does it make if a vehicle is registered, if it isn't driven? Reverse the current vehicle preference, and fuel consumption would fall without any change in what's "on the road" measured by registrations.
That's going to be enough sparing for me about the end of the world for a few days. Better go take my St. JOhn's Wort. (that's my code word for "stiff drink")
Best,
Matt
The USGS was predicting a least 300Gb in reserve growth.
I'm sure that reserve "revisions" will easily fill the shortfall in discoveries, on paper at least, for a couple more years anyhow. After all, there are still perhaps 1,000 Gb, maybe more, of reserves still in the ground, it would only take an annual 2.5% upwards "revision" to solve the discovery shortfall. Of course, revisions can cut both ways - might be troubling when we come to the days of downwards revisions. But I don't expect those days to arrive before peak oil is recognised, in fact I suggest that may be a sign of admission that peak oil has arrived.
Think of the USGS, for the most part, as academics. They are good scientists, but you would never hire them to help you find oil that you really wanted to produce and sell.
Morover, there may be 100 geoscientists working in industry with far bigger budgets and far better data compared to each geoscientist working for the USGS.
Our esteemed chancellor mused the other week that he would like to see an expansion (doubling) of the Combined Cadet Force into all schools.
Next up: ID Cards (no card?- you dont eat...). I am pretty sure UK Gov knows the game is pretty much up.
"ExxonMobil Corp. (XOM) booked more hydrocarbon reserves than it extracted in 2005 - but almost all of the additions come in the form of natural gas from Qatar."
http://realtimenews.slb.com/news/story.cfm?storyid=631459
This means that without gas from Qatar, Exxon would have booked nearly nothing in new reserves in 2005!! Bubba, have folks inside the industry started any serious discussion of peak oil yet?
http://yahoo.reuters.com/stocks/QuoteCompanyNewsArticle.aspx?storyID=urn:newsml:reuters.com:20060301 :MTFH62804_2006-03-01_12-26-53_L01550302&symbol=XOM.N
What's most interesting to me is that they received an exploration license on this block in 1999 and it took them until 2006 to actually begin drilling.
Is this a typical lead time or are the majors being extra deliberate about these wildcat ventures these days?
The data appears to confirm predictions of peaking oil and NG. It doesn't surprise me because I expected this based on all the posts at TOD.
Kind of depressing in one way but very useful in another. At least now we can start to dismiss the speculation that new fields will allow business as usual with respect to energy consumption. The world is just going to have to face the irrefutable evidence that oil and NG supplies are going to decrease in the future. Only after that acceptance can change take place.
I am not quite so nervous about the resource wars. Not every body is so short sighted as to think that consuming huge amounts of energy, fighting wars, is the best approach to obtaining more energy. Careful analysis might show this to be a zero sum game or even net loss of energy to the aggressor.
6.5:1 Damn, just think about that!
Allied victory was not inevitable. The Axis (and it was a true axis of Evil) came much closer than most of us realize to winning.
Thus, I think the correct generalization is that failed aggression is a bad strategy for solving energy problems. And since aggression by anybody (U.S., Russia, China, anybody) in the Middle East is likely to fail to secure oilfields at acceptable cost, then my personal preferance would be for the U.S. to pull out now, declare victory, and let the whole place burn. If Iran is about to get the bomb, a little birdie tells me that somebody has a plan to put them back in the dark ages. So forget about Iran. Let the Shiites slaughter Sunnis and vice versa. Let them fight themselves for the next century--and let us put a tariff of $100 per barrel of oil imported from the nasty parts of the world to quickly wean us from this toxic substance.
We received Texas and access to GOM, so we got a huge oil industry, Rockfellers, easy motoring, suburbs and G.W.Bush.
Probably we'd be better off without them now, don't know.
The point is that you don't know what you lose when you win and vice versa. A notable part of the history of Bulgaria is the reign of Tsar Simeon that conquered the whole Balkan Penisula and almost took over Konstantinopol (the cunning Byzanthiums were lucky they could provision the city by sea). Very good, but these successes exhausted so much the country that it started to descend, and after a century or so the same Byzanthiums that begged us for mercy took over the whole country quite easily.
Don't forget the Bushes are transplanted Connecticut yankees, despite their protestations to the contrary.
Nowhere does the Law of Unintended Consequences raise its ugly head than in war. And most of those unintended consequences are not good for either the victor or the loser.
As far as I can tell, everybody who participated in WW I was a loser in one respect or another. France and Great Britain exhausted and bankrupted themselves, and while they contained Germany's rising power, that didn't last very long and led directly to WW II. Russia overthrew a tyrannical monarchy, only to replace it with a tyrannical communist system. The US had no business being WW I at all, other than to placate the worried ruling WASP elite who didn't want to see their chums, the Brits lose to those nasty Huns and default on all the money we loaned them. And all the rest of the smaller countries suffered appalling casualties and economic loss. A perfect lose-lose game.
Regarding WW II, I take a somewhat revisionist view. While we defeated a meglomaniacal Nazi dictator bent on world domination, doing so made the world safe for a meglomaniacal Russian communist dictator bent on world domination.
Defeating Japan (which was not as difficult as popularly portrayed, owing to the fact that our industrial capability was roughly 10 times that of Japan's) eliminated an aggressive imperialist country, but led to Mao taking over China, and we all know what a positive development that was.
While the US came out on top, it found itself engaged in a 50-year Cold War that has sapped trillions of dollars out of the productive side of the economy to pay for a perpeptual military-industrial complex.
The Korean War and Vietnam were both such a bust that nobody I know even tries to point out anything positive about either.
So, I don't buy a lot of the nostalgic folklore that has gathered around WW I and WW II. WW I hardly made the world safe for democracy; but it might be argued that WW II made the world safe for communism. It was all folly on a grand scale.
In regard to making the world safe for Soviet communism, I have not noticed many Soviet communists lately.
BTW, have you read "Oriental Despotism" by Witfogel? A classic I highly recommend to all.
Well, in a very real sense WW II DID make the world safe for communism, for it enabled both the Soviet Union and Red China to flourish.
The Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight (a fate that could be in store for the US), not through any heroics on the part of the US.
Red China (excuse me, the Peoples Republic of China) is still a brutal totalitarian state and our most likely advesary should a hot war eventually develop over resources.
Mussolini was a buffoon, so you shouldn't insult Hitler and Tojo by mentioning him in the same breath :-)
My whole point was that WW I was a total unredeemable folly, and that WW II produced just about as many negative results as positive ones. Our former enemies,Germany and Japan, are now our friends (to use the term very loosely); and our former ally, the Soviet Union, became a mortal enemy for almost a half century. If Hitler had defeated the Soviet Union, we would probably have engaged in a similar cold war with a nuclear Nazi Germany. So take your pick of enemies.
Here's my review on Amazon, looking at it from a different prespective:
Deep Germanic insight into pre-industrial geopolitics,July 24, 1998
Reviewer: somsel@aol.com (San Luis Obispo, California) -
During an argument about California's water policies, I hear a Sierra Club representative pronounce that all irrigation-based societies were short-lived. Wittfogel shows just the opposite: at least in pre-industrial societies, cultures that can organize reliable agricultural irrigation schemes have been remarkably stable, productive, and powerful. The downside is that the conditions encourage rigid and despotic social forms. Book is weakest trying to make a case that Soviet Communism was a cultural descendent of Babylon (although Marx thought so too). The Germanic "Big Thought" style is stimulating for most of the book but gets a little heavy-handed in spots when it drifts away from hard facts. You don't have to read the whole thing to get the idea. It has a lot to say about the interplay of culture and environment.
"History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again." - Vonnegut
"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say." - Durant
More fun history quotes here:
http://www.wisdomquotes.com/cat_history.html
To quote from the military master Sun Tzu:
"Raising a host of a hundred thousand men and marching them great distances entails heavy loss on the people and a drain on the resources of the State.
The daily expenditure will amount to a thousand ounces
of silver. There will be commotion at home and abroad, and men will drop down exhausted on the highways.
As many as seven hundred thousand families will be impeded
in their labor."
"There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare."
I challenge you to find a single historian to dispute this statement.
Rome's wars with Carthage might be more analogous to WW II, while its long struggle against the peoples to the north might be more accurately compared to Vietnam or the current debacle in Iraq, though I would not want to push such an analogy too far. And as is well known, Rome went into permanent decline not so much due to outright military defeat, but rather due to the erosion of its economy and the corruption of its society that a prolonged open-ended war inevitably brings.
War obviously benefits the victors in many cases. For example, people of European ancestry fought Native Americans for 300 years to conquer the Americas. Now we white American citizens are fat, mostly dumb, and at least diverted, while most of the miserable descendents of the losers live on handouts or casinos. The wars against the Native Americans were the toughest wars U.S. whites ever fought.
BTW, it helps to fight well even if you lose. One can make a case that the Native American tribes (e.g. Seminole or Cheyenne) who fought the best, longest, and hardest are in less bad shape than others, such as the Mandan, who were wiped out to the last man, woman and child by our genocide through smallpox and alcohol plus a bit of shooting. Also, if you look at the history of New Zealand, you will find that the Maoris, fighting with spears, fought the gun-toting British to a standstill, and the treaty they signed with Queen Victoria has never been violated. Furthermore, I think many and probably most sociologists would grant the point that New Zealand has better race relations between its indigenous people and people of European ancestry than any other country.
No, 'rape' and 'genocide' would be a more accurate description.
Look, in all wars or armed conflicts there are obviously winners and losers. My point is that the winners usually don't wind up winning nearly as much as they had hoped, and in many cases the war had brought down more problems upon the winners than if they had never started the war in the first place. War is usually a very bad investment.
In my opinion, the last Åmerican war that was fully morally justified and had a clear-cut benevolent outcome was the Revolutionary War. Most of our wars that followed either were of dubious morality and/or had as many negative results as positive ones.
In this day and age of so-called 'fourth generation warfare' (see the articles by military analyst William S. Lind) the very concept of victory has become so muddied as to be almost meaningless. Realistically, what could victory possibly look like in Iraq or Afganistan? We are pissing away billions of dollars each week down a bottomless pit.
A short war is always better than a long war. WWI was a war of attriton that impacts us ALL today. That is why WWII was better, unless you were Soviet or Chinese - it hurts less.
That Carthage and Rome were relatively evenly matched in the 1st and 2nd Punic War made it a long war.
I may be niave on this point but our USA army in Iraq is not about oil. It is secondary. The primary reason is that with a deomcracy and vibrant economy, the large number of young unemplouyed are employed, and hence not an issue. It looks like it is failing and THAT is a big problem.
Silly me! And I thought it was because of all the WMD! But that can't be because there was none. Hmmm, now WHERE did I possibly get THAT idea?
I have always argued, perhaps wrongly, that Bush thought that by introducing democracy into the region that it would cure the ticking time bomb of over-population especially of young people, who have no jobs and get a little desperate. The biggest failing of this regime is that they do not understand foreigners. Bush's experience outside of Mexico and visits beyond Texas is really quite small pre 2000 election and the war in Iraq reflects it.
Good intentions poorly executed.
And they honestly though there were WMDs.
"Italy itself suffered cruelly in the war. Hannibal spent fourteen years there, mostly in southern Italy. During much of this time, both sides ruthlessly burned fields and orchards, slaughtered livestock, and destroyed villages. As the years went by, the steep hillsides began to lose their topsoil. By war's end, southern Italy was permanently impoverished. In fact, in our own century, in the 1960s, the Italian government began to attempt to recover and reclaim the land from Hannibal, an effort that still goes on fitfully. Hannibal's legacy outlived Rome itself."
"By 146, Rome had been at war for nearly a hundred years, almost without respite. The effort had taken its toll. The city now ruled an empire that stretched from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, but it ruled that empire with a government that had been designed to rule a city-state.
The strains would prove too great for the Republic. It took another hundred years for the Republic to fall apart, and that is the subject of the next narrative."
http://www.the-orb.net/textbooks/westciv/punic.html
courtesy of College of Staten Island, City University of New York
To be unhappy with past events is to be unhappy with all aspects of the present.
The Brits first occupied Iceland and than gave it over to the Americans. Goes back to April 1940 and the invasion of Denmark. The three hour war.
The U.S. occupied Iceland for one main reason--to prevent the Germans from occupying it and using Iceland for land-based aircraft to win the Battle of the Atlantic.
If the U-boats had won the Battle of the Atlantic, then Britain would have been unable to stop Rommel from racing through Egypt to the oil fields, and if necessary bailing out Paulus at Stalingrad.
Thus, the U.S. Marine occupation of Iceland was a crucial event in the war, and to celebrate it I shall here type out the lyrics to Herman Wouk's least-known work: "Ballad of the Leatherneck Corps."
Oh, the wind blows cold in Iceland, but the
wind's blown cold before,
And, it's not so hard in your own backyard
to be set for peace or war.
But, to fight for right and freedom, and to
keep our honor clean,
We are proud to claim the title of United
States Marine.
Oh, the wind blows cold in Iceland, but the
wind's blown cold before,
And, it's not so hard in your own backyard
to be set for peace or war.
But, to strike a blow on a distant foe, is a
job for The LEATHERNECK CORPS.
Where are you heading, Leatherneck?
I'm off to Tripoli, son! It's someplace in
Africa, don't know where,
But, an ornery pirate gang is there,
And, we're under orders to sweep it bare of
each pirate son-of-a-gun.
So, off they went, it was eighteen five,
And, they piled in there with a mighty
drive,
'Til hardly a pirate was left alive.
And, Jefferson said: "Well done."
Oh, the shore is strange in Iceland,
But, the shore's been strange before.
And, the folks at home don't have to roam,
To be set for peace or war.
But to challenge fear when it's far from
here,
Is a job for the LEATHERNECK CORPS.
Where are you heading, Leatherneck?
I'm off to Sumatra, son.
The natives there are a savage lot,
Our ships have been sunk, and our sailors
shot.
And, that place which they tell me is
burning hot,
Will be hotter before we're done.
So, off they went, back in thirty-two,
And, vengeance was had for each murdered
crew.
And, over the isle, Old Glory Flew.
And, Jackson said: "Well done."
Oh, the sea is rough off Iceland,
But, the sea's been rough before.
There are no rough seas where you sit at
ease.
All set for peace or war.
But, to face a foe half the world away,
Is a job for The LEATHERNECK CORPS.
Where are you heading, Leatherneck?
I'm off to China, son!
A bunch of Boxers are raising hob,
They're killing Christians, this crazy mob,
So, the U.S. Marines have got a job,
And, this one looks like fun.
So, in nineteen hundred, they sailed away,
And, fought the Boxers in old Cathay.
Pagodas crashed and they won the day.
And, McKinely wired: "Well done."
Oh, the gale roars high in Iceland,
But, the gale's roared high before.
And, it's cozy here, by the hearthside cheer,
To be set for peace or war.
But, to make a stand, in a far off land,
Is a job for the LEATHERNECK CORPS!
Where are you heading, Leatherneck?
I'm off to Iceland, son!
There's trouble brewing across the map,
And, it may, or may not, be our scrap,
But we ain't gonna wait til it's in our lap!
We'll head it off on the run!
So, off they march at a soldier's pace,
And, we pray that they have no fight to face
But, they've gone there anyway just in case.
And, America says: "Well done."
Oh, the nights may be long in Iceland,
But, the nights been long before.
And, it's not so hard in your own backyard,
To be set for peace or war.
But, to beat the worst, by arriving first,
Is a job for The LEATHERNECK CORPS!
Great poem. I have not heard that one before. I certainly agree that the Battle of the Atlantic had to be won. But I have you at a disadvantage, as my next book is on the invasion of Denmark and Norway. A quote from my chapter 8:
Iceland was also Danish and would be occupied by British troops on 10 May 1940. They wanted to prevent any German action against Iceland and immediately occupied all communications facilities. The United States took over occupation of Iceland in July 1941.
That is when your marines moved in so the Brits could go fight elsewhere.
BTW, I have some little-known information on the Norweigian resistance during World War II, but unfortunately I cannot say much, because it involved Norweigian underground people killing Quislings, and the children of those killed are still alive and resentful in some cases. I've had the good fortune to listen to people who know things that never have been (and probably never will be) written in books.
What was a German doing there?
ER
In my darker hours I sometimes wonder, if peak oil is here and we start using a lot more nuclear power, how long we have until "peak uranium".
To make it harder let's assume we have a 1% demand growth (no conservation etc., business as usual). This will drop the years to 180, and the half of the uranium will be mined after 126 year.
All of this of course is BS, the uranium resources are thousand times huger than that (0.0003% of the earth's crust, 700 times more than gold, 5 times as much as copper). Actually they mostly depend on our will to mine for them. It is estimated that a ten-fold increase of the uranium price increases the economically accessible uranium reserves 300 times. Plus there is also thorium which is 3 times as abundant as uranium.
In general don't worry about it running out, the limts on its use are all above ground.
that give more information, from the OGJ from Feb 20th.
I would add that it makes sense that oil will become more valuable in the out years, and so investing in safe oil (like in Canada) is a good bet. The tipping point is when people realize that what we are doing is making polar bears an endangered species and Olympic Winter Games problematic.
My guess is about $250 billion but I don't have a clue as to where I came up with that number.
With good data series for E&P and for BOEs discovered, one could plot the cost of production per BOE over time.
Bet it's going up steeply.
It's not. There have been several articles in the fiancial press about how Big Oil doesn't know what to do with all the cash that's pouring in.
Most of the articles blame fear that oil will drop in price, but some, like this one, also note that there's really nowhere left to drill. So Big Oil ends up "drilling on Wall St." - buying up smaller companies to get access to their reserves.
and then that 'province' will be pretty well explored.
The Share buy backs basically indicate that they have done all they (IOC's)can do and here is the cash back to invest elsewhere. It is a shame. Of all the companies with huge amounts of capital required for any new build Nukes, the major IOC's have the most. UK starts impoprting oil this year and for every year thereafter. Cash that could have been used in Nuke building and serious alternative energies will bleed out from Britain and not be available for this purpose as the balance of payments go into the red.
We have a nice litmus test coming up: In six years time London hosts the Olympic Games (assuming we can all afford the Air fares)
1. Of course, the military and geopolitical campaign to control as much as possible of remaining reserves remains key and can only intensify, otherwise collapse comes earlier rather than later.
2. Coal to liquids. This is their best shot at keeping the transportation system going as is. The tar sands, shale and other stuff is harder. The tranportation system is key - the military, the entire economy as presently structured deeply dependent on it. Prices will force the poor and not-so-poor into car pooling.
3. Coal and nuclear for electricity, leaving more of the gas for home heating, industrial, etc. Coal is what there is -- nuclear they'd love to revive.
4. Gas for home heating. Home heating is NOT crucial to the economy -- especially if poor people get cold. And even the middle class can move to heating one room and wearing jackets in the house. Price again will take care of all this.
I know there are gas-to-liquid projects, but the market for gas unliquified can take all that's produced.
The Germans, when confronted with the same problem for a different reason, oil shortage, went for coal-to-liquids. Our guys have used their (the Germans') playbook in a lot of other areas. Why re-invent the wheel?
I'm not saying there won't be all kinds of efforts at the state and local level that are reasonable and run against this. There will also be all kinds of experiments with solar, wind, biofuels, etc. But I'm simply guessing at what will be the main directions set at the top.
Not listed is the greater role of the military at home needed to handle the impoverished - terrorists all.
I would finally add that because we are so wasteful, so extravagant, there is an enormous amount of elasticity on the down-side -- that is opportunity to reduce consumption -- while raising prices to maintain or increase profitability of key industries. All that will happen is that the already skewed class structure will bring us closer still to second or third world status, except that we will have an immense inherited infrastructure from better days. Of course, once that infrastructure crumbles beyond a certain point, then it's over.
in Germany when you needed fuel for Panzers at ANY cost.
Also, one of the energy inputs was virtually free: Slave labour.
And probably a lot more of it in the future.
Which is Richard Duncan's Olduvai Theory in a nutshell.
Thanks for the post, Bubba. I hope you don't mind me telling folks that it extends my story The End of Exploration? from a while back. So, I can't say I didn't expect this bad news. The mitigation time for preparing for peak oil as in the Hirsch report is rapidly approaching zero. We are all losers here.
Any one year's discoveries tell us about future production N years out. I know it depends on a number of complex factors, but what would you say the average for N is in the current era?
LINK
That sounds like loafing to me.
I don't think we can rely somehow on oil that no one even knows if it's there or not. Many seem to take the position that any place unexplored must be full of oil and we just need to drill. I think this is a risky assumption to say the least.
If your inference is that if you allowed the IOC's into Saudi Arabia, and Iran (forget Iraq for the moment - they are a disaster) the IOC's would be able to increase production in those countries, I am almost certainly in agreement with you. On the other hand, the IOC's are already heavlily in Russia (Sakhalin I, II, III; BP-TNK; ConocoPhillips-Lukoil). Furthermore, within the industry Saudi Aramco is considered one of the best National Oil Companies and very competent. Moreover, the political reality is that no other company is going to get in there to explore for oil (gas - yes).
If you are arguing that possible peaking of production is a man made event and not a function of geology I will partially agree with you. However, oil production, period, only makes sense in the context of human habitation of the planet. It is irrelevant otherwise.
In the end, however, there is only so much oil in the ground, and we are using it up awfully fast.
Your point is well-taken too. I think it's best to leave as much oil as possible in the ground, for later. The NOCs are doing a good job of that, and they should be supported. High prices are a good thing. I wish the U.S. would pass a solid gas tax though, so they could get some of the money (for rail etc.)
We are using about 85mbd all liquids each day. What are the discoveries adding up to?
Perhaps they will have to start looking for abiotic oil soon ;)
Or the IOCs could recruit vast numbers of economists to explore for oil since the geologists are doing such a poor job of it ;-))