Nevertheless, BP is cautious in defining oil reserves. At the top of an introductory web page on the subject, the company states baldly: “Nobody knows or can know how much oil exists under the earth's surface or how much it will be possible to produce in the future.”
And while the amount of proven oil reserves, and their extraction, are rising each year, so is concernabout how their recovery. Not only do new extraction methods use huge amounts of energy to get even more energy, particularly from shale, they also use chemicals and metals that many fear poison nearby soil and groundwater, and generate huge amounts of toxic wastewater.OilPrice
BP’s Latest Estimate Says World’s Oil Will Last 53.3 Years
Andy Tully
Phew...I'm glad they threw that extra ".3" in there. I was getting worried.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I had a chuckle over that, too.
ReplyDeleteThey are talking about proven oil reserves which has a more specific financial meaning than in common parlance. It implies the amount of production that could occur at today's prices, with today's technology, with existing infrastructure investments, at existing and known formations to which legal rights of production have already been secured.
ReplyDeleteBut you always have new things on the horizon, like the exciting new coal emissions regulations that effectively require that coal plants capture their carbon dioxide. Initially that was though to be too expensive and would close coal plants but as it turns out 90+% of the available oil in a tight rock formation is stuck in the rock and the best way to release that oil is with carbon dioxide pumped into the well. There has never been enough commercially available C02 but with the new Obama regs, there outlook is very promising to dramatically increase oil production from old fields and to increase the lifespan of current well investments while also increasing the use of coal for power generation.
It's too early to know, but if I had to guess, as many these early projects are completed in the next couple years, dozens of shelved coal plants could end up being built after all. In a decade or so, we'll probably have quite a few more carbon dioxide pipelines going to places like the Eagle Ford, Permian, Bakken and Marcellus to produce far more oil than is currently estimated as recoverable.
Ironic sometimes how a little government regulation intended to discourage one behavior can actually cause industry to become more efficient and productive as they find users for waste products that actually make activity far more profitable in the long run. Basic old fashioned economics, right?