Stories tagged with "reserve"

Predicting Future Supply from Undiscovered Oil

Posted by Sam Foucher on November 26, 2008 - 10:05am
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: discovery, iea, reserve [list all tags]

"Now what is the message there? The message is that there are known "knowns." There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns."
— Donald Rumsfeld


The shock model, originally proposed by WebHubbleTelescope, is an attempt to link discovery data, reserves and production (see this post and this post for more details). Put simply, it is based on the observation that the oil production cycle results in a time shift and dispersion of the original discovered resources. In other words, there is a delay between first discovery and a mature oil production as well as a transformation of the original discovery curve imposed by the available production infrastructure. In its last report, the IEA is proposing the following forecast for supply for yet-to-be-found (YTF) oil fields:
 


Unfortunately, they offer few details on how this result was obtained except that they are forecasting 114 Giga-Barrels of new discoveries between 2008 and 2030 that once developed will bring around 44 Gb of new supply until 2030. I propose to see if this result could be derived from the shock model.
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