This is part II of a guest post by Jean Laherrère, long-term contributor to The Oil Drum. Jean worked 37 years for TOTAL on exploration and production of oil and gas, and since his retirement, has worked tirelessly to analyse the world's oil & gas data and developments.

In part I of this article, Jean looked into Maugeri's concepts of production capacity and reserve growth. It showed how Maugeri's bottom-up analysis is based on optimistic assumptions regarding Iraq and by taking at face value the data published by OPEC. Furthermore, Jean pointed out that man of Maugeri's oil production forecasts are above any projections by any agency, most notably in the case of the US.

In this second part, Jean dissects Maugeri's assumption on reserves growth, on which his optimistic production forecasts relay. It his shown how Maugeri wrongly extrapolates the effects of flawed reserve accounting in the US to the rest of the world. Maugeri's also fails to acknowledge the conflicting reports and reporting practices of the several agencies producing oil data at world level. There are also some important remarks on the Maugeri's concept of conventional oil and other details that bring into doubt the knowledge of this author on the field.

This is a guest post by Jean Laherrère a long time contributor to TheOilDrum.

Digest

• The BP Statistical Review has the merit to release every year free and convenient updated historical data on energy.
• This data is recopied from what is reported by national agencies, avoiding diplomatic conflicts.
• Despite the heterogeneity of the data, the report displays a ridiculously high number of digits, in contradiction with the real accuracy of the sources.
• The report wrongly adds unconventional to conventional reserves.
• BP ignores backdating, using obsolete reporting rules that lead to artificial reserve growth.
• Most economists believe this reserve growth to be the real, when in fact known Oil and Gas reserves peaked in 1980.

This is the third and final post on this series on the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) by Jean Laherrère, a long-time guest contributor to TheOilDrum. The goal of this series is to compare the evolution of reserves estimates in the GOM with the actual production figures that show the oil decline, thereby investigating the reliability of reserve estimates. In this third installment, Jean looks into older and shallower fields as a term of comparison to synthesize his finds and assesses the impact on his world all liquids forecast. The first installment analysed data on Thunder Horse & Mars-Ursa and the second Atlantis, Mad Dog & Eugene Island.

Update: Prompted by the comments, Jean sent an additional graph with cumulative Deepwater discovery and production, to be found at the of this post.

This a guest post by Jean Laherrère, a long time guest contributor to TheOilDrum. Jean thoroughly analyses field production data for the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) in several posts. The goal of this series is to compare the evolution of reserves estimates in the GOM with the actual production figures that show the oil decline. Thereby the reliability of reserve estimates can be investigated. This first installment shall look into Thunder Horse and Mars-Ursa fields.

The world oil and gas 2P cumulative discoveries can be modelled with 3 cycles [NE: 2P discoveries represent those resources proven as reserves plus those that probably shall become reserves; more details here]. For crude excluding extra-heavy oil, the first cycle corresponds to surface exploration (1900-1950); the second cycle to seismic exploration starting in 1930 and a third cycle corresponding to deepwater starting in 1990. Deepwater refers to oil resources that are found under water columns of 500 meters depth or more. This late coming discovery cycle has had a very important impact in several economies around the world, especially those of the OECD, that depleted their conventional resources much earlier. This 3 cycle oil discovery model trends towards an ultimate of 2200 Gb (crude less extra-heavy oil) against a cumulative production already past 1100 Gb.

Figure 1: world Oil (excluding extra-heavy oils - XH) and Gas cumulative discovery and production with respective models.