Giant oil find reopens debate about oil supplies

Excitement around Tiber [Gulf of Mexico] comes amid a welter of new finds both in established oil producing areas such as Iran and in new areas such as Uganda and western Greenland. There has recently been an oil rush in the deep waters off Brazil and talk of large onshore volumes of new gas in Holland, although the UK's North Sea fields have seen a slump in drilling levels. "Its an amazing turnaround from the gloom of the last 10 years. All these finds will take a long time to bring on stream, but it shows the industry is capable of finding more oil than it uses and shows we have not come to any peak," said Peter Odell, professor emeritus of international energy studies at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

However, exponents of peak oil theories said the BP find would not fundamentally change the longer-term supply-and-demand picture. "The International Energy Agency said in its 2008 report that the world needed to find six new Saudi Arabias to meet the growing demand for oil in the future," said Jeremy Leggett, chairman of the renewable power company Solarcentury, and a key peak energy specialist.

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NOTE FROM BENNY PEISER: The recent discoveries and the prospects of increasing deep sea oil recovery appears to confirm what the late Julian Simon underlined many years ago: As oil demand and prices rise, so do the economic incentives to invest in new technologies that allow deeper drilling, leading to more discoveries and increased recovery:"The history of energy economics shows that, in spite of troubling fears in each era of running out of whichever source of energy was important at that time, energy has grown progressively less scarce, as shown by long-run falling energy prices. The cause of the increasing plenty in the supply of energy has been the development of improved extraction processes and the discovery of new sources and new types of energy. These new developments have not been fortuitous, but rather have been induced by increased demand caused in part by rising population. A sure way to err in forecasting future supplies is to look at current "known reserves" of oil, coal, and other fossil fuels." (The Ultimate Resource II, 1996)

From Greenie Watch

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