This site says there are approximately 50 million barrels of oil in this ONE well under the gulf. Between pumping prior to the spill and the spill itself - they’ve only consumed less than 2% of the oil.
How accurate do you think that is? Even if it is inaccurate by a large margin, how does this amount of oil compare to the stores in the Middle East? They’ve been pumping for a lot longer so they’ve got much less now than they did when they started…
But how do our offshore reserves compare with the desert oil? Is it enough to warrant the risks involved of drilling under the Gulf? Risks which are now very clearly understood?
Getting an accurate estimate of Middle East oil reserves is extremely difficult for political reasons. Oil production quotas are based on known reserves, which gives countries an incentive to overstate their reserves. It is very common in that area for countries to claim new oil discoveries while providing very little (if any) proof to back up their claims.
However difficult it may be to pin down an exact number, a rough order of magnitude is that there are several hundreds of billions of barrels of known reserves in the Middle East.
So to my untrained brain…that seems like it is NOT worth the incredible risks involved…50 million versus hundreds of billions?
Fer cryin’ out loud…that’s like comparing a drinking glass to a swimming pool…but you have to cross lava to get to the drinking glass. And the swimming pool is inhabited by unfriendly people…but not lava.
Really? You don’t think commercial confidentiality might have something to do with it? Also, the amount you can extract depends on how you extract it.
My brother, who does reservoir modelling, would disagree with you. The problem was that teams operated on 4 year cycles. They would find oil and overstate what they’d found, leaving it for the next team to sort out the mess. That next team might manage it, leaving a bigger mess for the third team, and so on. This becomes important when you realise that the state taxes the oil for its own programmes - building schools, hospitals, and the like. This came to a head several years ago: you might recall a big scandal with Shell having to restate all its reserves. My brother was in charge of this for one country. So they are now very careful to accurately assess what is down there.
The argument for drilling is that no one well anywhere can provide a sufficient amount of oil. Nor would anybody want it to. Countries, companies, and consumers are better off with numerous sources of oil. A problem at an individual site is less serious to the world market that way. Different wells also bring up different kinds of oil, which are easier to work with and are useful in different ways. You can compare it to talk about alternative energy. No one kind of alternative - wind, solar, nuclear, clean coal, tidal - will solve future energy needs. What will work is having some of all of these.
The arguments against drilling involve the risks of spills and blow-outs in sensitive environments, the costs of pollution from burning oil, and the economic power it gives to various governments and companies.
You can weigh these arguments and many more any way you like. I don’t see any clear answer on any side.
From what I’ve read, inflated declarations of oil reserves are a fairly common problem among OPEC nations. IIRC, Iran increased its stated reserves around 2002 without providing any data to back it up, and Qatar did the same thing about a year later.
I don’t work in the industry though, so if your brother has better knowledge and says that this sort of thing isn’t going on these days he would probably know better than I do.
I think you’re comparing apples and oranges. The hundreds of billions numbers refers to the mid-east reserves in the whole region, which is composed of many different reservoirs of oil, which require a large number of wells to access. The 50 million refers to a single reservoir, not a whole region.
According to this, there are over 60 billion barrels total in the Gulf of Mexico.
Yes, they were, but politics aside, it was the oil companies giving erroneous figures to the nations.
I’m not going to identify the country for which my brother did the restatement of reserves for his company, but they were indeed inflated, and he dramatically deflated them in his restatement, which was after 2002. Since the restatement as a whole (my brother’s work was but one part) also caused a major dip in the share price, and major ructions at board level, they’re much more careful these days.
