Enough - but expensive!

With a thousand barrels of oil being spent every second, the equivalent of 86 million bopd, and with a 25 year forecast saying that this number will increase to 1,500 bopd, explorationists are left with a huge challenge; in the Gulf of Mexico (page 14-24), the Rocky Mountains (page 50-56), the Niger Delta (page 36-39) and elsewhere.

Having said that, we need to be aware that the world’s oil resources go a lot further than light sweet crude (e.g. "North Sea Brent", "West Texas Intermediate") which is the prime petroleum product of today. There are a number of other sources for liquid oil - heavy oil, oil shales (GEO ExPro, No. 3, 2004) and oil sands (GEO ExPro No. 4/5, 2005) - that to a large extent have already been found. Similarly, there are huge amounts of gas stranded in unconventional reservoirs, such as gas hydrates (GEO ExPro No. 2, 2005), tight gas sands, gas shales and coal bed methane.

These abundant (!) resources have long awaited higher oil prices before being developed.

The price of energy has now reached a level at which unconventional oil and gas reservoirs are rapidly being developed. This is clearly demonstrated in the Canadian oil sands where oil production has reached approximately one million barrels per day,and by 2020, production will grow to four million
barrels per day. The ultimate volume of bitumen in place is reckoned to be 1.6 trillion (1012) barrels or 250 times the volume of oil that can be recovered from Prudhoe Bay.

Recoverable, conventional oil resources are estimated to 3 billion barrels worldwide. Additional unconventional resources (extra heavy oil, oil sands, oil shales) bring these recoverable resources to 4-5 trillion barrels (ExxonMobil Energy Outlook 2004). Of this, approximately 1 trillion barrels have been
produced since oil was first discovered.

The good news is therefore that we will have plenty of access to (expensive) oil and gas in the foreseeable future.

The bad news is that the CO2-level in the atmosphere is bound to increase until these vast resources have all been burned.

Have a warm day!
Halfdan Carstens
Editor in Chief