2/19/13, "Why the world isn't running out of oil," UK Telegraph, Brian Viner
"On the evening of April 18 1977, President Jimmy Carter invited television cameras into the Oval Office and portentously announced to the American people that..,“The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 per cent of our energy are running out.”...
Hardly
anyone questioned his facts. And yet he was about as wrong as he could be.
Far from running out, oil and natural gas reserves were, if not
inexhaustible, then unfathomably vast. Nobody knew that then, but they do
now.
The 75-page study, by oil executive Leonardo Maugeri, was based on a field-by-field analysis of most of the major oil exploration and development projects in the world, and it predicted a 20 per cent increase in global oil production by 2020.
In particular, the report highlighted the deep-water reservoirs in Brazil’s Santos basin, which are thought to hold as much as 150 billion barrels of oil, Venezuela’s “extra-heavy” oil in the Orinoco Belt, estimated at 1.2 trillion barrels, the oil sands in Canada, the Kwanza basin in Angola, and the Bakken and Three Forks fields in North Dakota and Montana, in the United States, which, Maugeri said, “could become the equivalent of a Persian Gulf-producing country” all on their own.
And the reason for this boom? A technological revolution that is transforming the way we both find and extract oil....
One of the greatest advances, and the procedure that’s dominated the headlines in recent years, for both good reasons and bad, is hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. In essence, fracking is a way of releasing oil or gas that is tightly bound up in shale rock, using immensely powerful water pumps exerting a pressure of up to 20,000 pounds per sq inch. Fracking was actually pioneered in Kansas in the Forties but it is only recently, thanks to numerous improvements, that it has become economically viable. Oil previously thought unreachable is now within our grasp.
And nobody is exploiting these advances with more enthusiasm than America. In just six years, the number of barrels being produced by the Bakken formation, a unit of shale rock occupying about 200,000 sq miles stretching from Montana to North Dakota, has increased 100-fold — from 6,000 a day to 600,000 a day – and made North Dakota the second-biggest oil producer in America, after Texas. The population of the main town, Williston, has tripled in 10 years as truck drivers and oilfield workers (not to mention strippers) have flocked there from all over recession-hit America. North Dakota has new businesses and new hospital wings, but also an infrastructure groaning under the weight of the influx....
The boom in North Dakota is rapidly transforming America from a net importer of oil to a net exporter, thus reducing its dependency on the Middle East. China, Russia and Argentina, impressed by the results in the US, are also pushing ahead with their own fracking operations. And Linc Energy announced just last month that it was hoping to extract 233 billion barrels of oil from shale rock in the Australian outback, with a potential worth of £13 trillion. But fracking is just one of many remarkable breakthroughs behind the new boom....
The oil boom has also been fueled by new, more accurate methods of drilling....In short, it means there is virtually no chance of drilling a dry well; oil companies had a 99 per cent success rate in 2011. ...Technology, however, has an unstoppable forward momentum, and what seems mind-boggling now will soon seem old-fashioned....
“What is going on out there is the marine equivalent of the space programme,” Robert Bryce, an American author and journalist specialising in energy issues, tells me. “And all of it is privately funded.”...
One of the fiercest battlegrounds over the past two decades has been Brazil....The history of oil exploration in Africa is not a happy one. Angola was ranked a lowly 168th out of 182 countries in Transparency International’s recent “perceptions of corruption” index, so one has to wonder how much of the oil money will benefit the country’s neediest citizens, and how much will end up furnishing the palaces of tinpot dictators.
But it is naive in the extreme to imagine the genie will ever be put back in the bottle. As Robert Bryce says: “The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”" via Tom Nelson
=======================================
6/25/12, "New study by Harvard Kennedy School researcher forecasts sharp increase in world oil production capacity, and risk of price collapse," Belfer Center at Harvard University by James F. Smith, findings of Leonardo Maugeri
.
Moreover, as well as bountiful oilfields in North America, Russia, Saudi
Arabia and other producers in the Middle East, there are massive, barely
tapped reserves in South America, Africa and the Arctic: not billions of
barrels’ worth, but trillions. So the planet is not about to run out of oil.
On the contrary, according to a Harvard University report published last
year, we are heading for a glut.
The 75-page study, by oil executive Leonardo Maugeri, was based on a field-by-field analysis of most of the major oil exploration and development projects in the world, and it predicted a 20 per cent increase in global oil production by 2020.
In particular, the report highlighted the deep-water reservoirs in Brazil’s Santos basin, which are thought to hold as much as 150 billion barrels of oil, Venezuela’s “extra-heavy” oil in the Orinoco Belt, estimated at 1.2 trillion barrels, the oil sands in Canada, the Kwanza basin in Angola, and the Bakken and Three Forks fields in North Dakota and Montana, in the United States, which, Maugeri said, “could become the equivalent of a Persian Gulf-producing country” all on their own.
And the reason for this boom? A technological revolution that is transforming the way we both find and extract oil....
One of the greatest advances, and the procedure that’s dominated the headlines in recent years, for both good reasons and bad, is hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. In essence, fracking is a way of releasing oil or gas that is tightly bound up in shale rock, using immensely powerful water pumps exerting a pressure of up to 20,000 pounds per sq inch. Fracking was actually pioneered in Kansas in the Forties but it is only recently, thanks to numerous improvements, that it has become economically viable. Oil previously thought unreachable is now within our grasp.
And nobody is exploiting these advances with more enthusiasm than America. In just six years, the number of barrels being produced by the Bakken formation, a unit of shale rock occupying about 200,000 sq miles stretching from Montana to North Dakota, has increased 100-fold — from 6,000 a day to 600,000 a day – and made North Dakota the second-biggest oil producer in America, after Texas. The population of the main town, Williston, has tripled in 10 years as truck drivers and oilfield workers (not to mention strippers) have flocked there from all over recession-hit America. North Dakota has new businesses and new hospital wings, but also an infrastructure groaning under the weight of the influx....
The boom in North Dakota is rapidly transforming America from a net importer of oil to a net exporter, thus reducing its dependency on the Middle East. China, Russia and Argentina, impressed by the results in the US, are also pushing ahead with their own fracking operations. And Linc Energy announced just last month that it was hoping to extract 233 billion barrels of oil from shale rock in the Australian outback, with a potential worth of £13 trillion. But fracking is just one of many remarkable breakthroughs behind the new boom....
The oil boom has also been fueled by new, more accurate methods of drilling....In short, it means there is virtually no chance of drilling a dry well; oil companies had a 99 per cent success rate in 2011. ...Technology, however, has an unstoppable forward momentum, and what seems mind-boggling now will soon seem old-fashioned....
“What is going on out there is the marine equivalent of the space programme,” Robert Bryce, an American author and journalist specialising in energy issues, tells me. “And all of it is privately funded.”...
One of the fiercest battlegrounds over the past two decades has been Brazil....The history of oil exploration in Africa is not a happy one. Angola was ranked a lowly 168th out of 182 countries in Transparency International’s recent “perceptions of corruption” index, so one has to wonder how much of the oil money will benefit the country’s neediest citizens, and how much will end up furnishing the palaces of tinpot dictators.
But it is naive in the extreme to imagine the genie will ever be put back in the bottle. As Robert Bryce says: “The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”" via Tom Nelson
=======================================
6/25/12, "New study by Harvard Kennedy School researcher forecasts sharp increase in world oil production capacity, and risk of price collapse," Belfer Center at Harvard University by James F. Smith, findings of Leonardo Maugeri
.
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