I thought the people on this board had sort of reached a consensus that it is not reserves necessarily that's running out, but economically recoverable reserves... sheeeit... everyone here knows that more than half of all the oil ever found is still where we found it... the problem is, can we get it out/produce it, and if so how much does THAT cost... we are seeing that we can even find more large-ish reservoirs like the Santos basin or Jack, but the question that has not been answered yet is how much will the oil in those cost to bring to market? And even (especially?) with the new pre-salt discoveries or ultra-deep GoM discoveries there will be a certain percentage of oil in place that will be easier, i.e., cheaper, to produce than some other, larger percentage will be and we still won't (using existing technology) be able to get more than maybe 40% of that to market under the rosiest of scenarios.
Peak production and decline rates will rule the POO until/unless there is another big technological leap that allows recovering higher pct. of oil in place in existing fields/reservoirs, let alone the stuff in the really hard to produce fields such as pre-salt and ultra-deep fields.
Environmentalism may be another obstacle, but by no means the biggest or most insurmountable one, IMO... the very geological nature of what's left in the ground and what we're able to find now present more than enough obstacles to production growth, and I firmly believe that when peak production and decline rates really begin to bite and threaten to throw civilization back to the 18th century (1700s) any environmental obstacles will be dropped faster than a burning hot ember in a bare hand... it's just politics... focus on the geo-physics and technology and the future looks bleak enough... until/unless we see significant breakthroughs... if/when that happens, then we can worry about the politics of it all.
Jim |
