“Some commentators hope that new technology will lead to important deepwater finds. Some new deepwater areas with giant potential, such as the Perdido Trend in the western Gulf of Mexico, will no doubt be found, but generally, the geology of most deepwater tracts is not very promising.”
– Colin Campbell (founder: Association for the Study of Peak Oil), Noroil, December 1989.
The past week was a bad one for peak oil enthusiasts, as three separate announcements indicated the abundance of undiscovered petroleum.
First, BP announced that it has found a field in the Lower Tertiary basin in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, named Tiber, containing something on the order of 3 billion barrels.
Next, Petrobras announced another discovery in the pre-salt basin, this one Guara, containing about 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil.…
For several years now, a number of peak oil advocates such as Matt Simmons, T. Boone Pickens (aka “I believe in free markets, but give me subsidies”) and Ken Deffeyes have been arguing that May 2005 was the peak of world oil production. They arrived at this by noting that crude plus condensate (excluding natural gas liquids, biofuels, etc) peaked and declined in that month. Matt went so far as to wager with me that we would never surpass that amount.
Aside from the fact that C+C production has peaked and dropped several times in the past 2 decades, only to recover, it has, on preliminary data, surpassed that again this July. However, there is a distinct possibility that the numbers will be revised downwards leaving May 2005 as the highest point to date. …