Tag: Gulf of Mexico

World Oil Production

D Coyne 353 Comments

A guest post by David Archibald

The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of Dennis Coyne or Ron Patterson.

The BP Statistical Review of World Energy has oil production data by country up to the end of 2015. This is what that looks like from 1988:

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The United States increased production by 5.1 million barrels per day from 2010 to 2015. The increase in production from countries around the Persian Gulf over the same period was slightly less at 5.0 million barrels per day. The increase in total world production was 8.4 million barrels per day so the rest of the world declined by some 1.7 million barrels per day. This was despite Canadian production rising 1.0 million barrels per day from oil sands developments plus some other increases from Russia, Brazil, Colombia etc. Most oil producing countries are in well-established long term decline or plateau at best. How these trends will interact can approached from a bottom-up basis. To that end, the following graphs show likely production profiles by region for the next five years. Read More

Overview of the Northern Deepwater Gulf of Mexico

D Coyne 231 Comments

by SouthLaGeo

The post that follows is a guest post by SouthLaGeo, a geologist with over 30 years of oil industry experience.

SouthLageo/

In this post, I will address 3 topics relating to the Northern Deepwater Gulf of Mexico –
1. Historical oil production
2. One view of the future of exploration
3. EUR ranges

I will limit my comments to oil production (not gas production). All production data is from BSEE/BOEM. The play outlines on the map are my best estimates. I will be using the BSEE definition of deepwater which includes water depths greater than 1000’. And, I will be assuming a Business As Usual future – by that I mean that fossil fuels will continue to be an important an energy source, and the world will continue to be able to afford them. Read More

Peak Oil Is Back

Ron Patterson 522 Comments

Where did all the oil go? The peak is back

An extensive new scientific analysis published in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Energy & Environment says that proved conventional oil reserves as detailed in industry sources are likely “overstated” by half.

According to standard sources like the Oil & Gas Journal, BP’s Annual Statistical Review of World Energy, and the US Energy Information Administration, the world contains 1.7 trillion barrels of proved conventional reserves.

However, according to the new study by Professor Michael Jefferson of the ESCP Europe Business School, a former chief economist at oil major Royal Dutch/Shell Group, this official figure which has helped justify massive investments in new exploration and development, is almost double the real size of world reserves.

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIRES) is a series of high-quality peer-reviewed publications which runs authoritative reviews of the literature across relevant academic disciplines.

According to Professor Michael Jefferson, who spent nearly 20 years at Shell in various senior roles from head of planning in Europe to director of oil supply and trading, “the five major Middle East oil exporters altered the basis of their definition of ‘proved’ conventional oil reserves from a 90 percent probability down to a 50 percent probability from 1984. The result has been an apparent (but not real) increase in their ‘proved’ conventional oil reserves of some 435 billion barrels.”

Global reserves have been further inflated, he wrote in his study, by adding reserve figures from Venezuelan heavy oil and Canadian tar sands – despite the fact that they are “more difficult and costly to extract” and generally of “poorer quality” than conventional oil. This has brought up global reserve estimates by a further 440 billion barrels.

Jefferson’s conclusion is stark: “Put bluntly, the standard claim that the world has proved conventional oil reserves of nearly 1.7 trillion barrels is overstated by about 875 billion barrels. Thus, despite the fall in crude oil prices from a new peak in June, 2014, after that of July, 2008, the ‘peak oil’ issue remains with us.”

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