To: jttmab who wrote (207059 ) 10/27/2006 12:06:44 AM From: mistermj Read Replies (3) | Respond to More expert debunking of the Peak Oil Myth. USGS shows Hubberts predictions to be wrong...yet again.They point out that reserve growth and new discoveries have been outpacing oil consumption. (Reserve growth is the increase in production in already discovered and developed fields.) From 1995 and 2003 the world consumed 236 billion barrels of oil. It also saw reserve growth of 175 billion barrels, combined with 138 billion barrels from new discoveries, added a total of 313 billion barrels to the world’s proven oil reserves. In the U.S., oil field reserves typically turn out to be four to nine times as high as the original estimates. The increase in production is a result of improved recovery technologies, further discoveries in the field, and improved field management. For geological reasons, petroleum engineers cannot pump every drop of oil out of a reservoir. But by 2004 technological advances enabled them to recover 35 percent of a conventional reservoir’s oil, up from an average of 22 percent in 1980. If this recovery factor can be increased by another five percentage points, that would boost worldwide recoverable reserves by more than all of Saudi Arabia’s current proven reserves. Economides points out that in 1976 the U.S. was estimated to have 23 billion barrels of reserves remaining. In 2005 it still had 23 billion barrels of oil reserves, even though American oil fields produced almost 40 billion barrels of oil between 1976 and 2005.
