Peak Oil News and Message Boards

Size of discovery: 55-100 million barrels recoverable
Date: 11/11/2013
Company(s): Statoil
Name: Snilehorn
Location: Norway
API: light oil
Flow rate of test well(s): No information
Estimated production startup date: No information
LINK

Recoverable running total year to date: 7.716 billion barrels minimum to 11.867 billion barrels maximum
OIP running total year to date: 1 billion barrels minimum to 1 billion barrels maximum

For reference, here are the totals for the previous years I posted 2 pages ago:

2012 Totals:

Recoverable Total: 22.596 billion barrels minimum to 26.876 billion barrels maximum
OIP Total: 9.3 billion barrels minimum to 9.7 billion barrels maximum

------------------------------------

2011
Total discoveries listed as recoverable: 11.581 billion barrels minimum to 14.281 billion barrels maximum
Total discoveries listed as Oil-In-Place: 300 million barrels minimum to 300 million barrels maximum
2010
Total discoveries listed as recoverable: 41.577 billion barrels minimum to 44.873 billion barrels maximum
Total discoveries listed as Oil-In-Place: 91.26 billion barrels minimum to 92.8 billion barrels maximum
2009
Total discoveries listed as recoverable: 12.009 billion barrels minimum - 18.731 billion barrels maximum
Total discoveries listed as Oil-In-Place: 13.514 billion barrels minimum - 15.069 billion barrels maximum
-----------------------------------
2008: 24.009 billion - 27.758 billion barrels
2007: 32.32 billion - 36.85 billion barrels
2006: 10.65 - 25.9 billion barrels

/catalog.

kublikhan wrote:

rockdoc123 wrote:simply put it is price. The reason unconventionals became economic was due to dwindling ready supply of cheaper conventionals and resultant price rises. An interesting bit of trivia in this regard, however, is that certain unconventionals are now cheaper to extract than remaining conventionals (eg: liquid rich shale gas versus deepwater GOM gas).

This is a good suggestion. Price is a good metric to look at as it captures many factors. Notice how much higher the price of oil is today compared to historically. This is a good indication how much more difficult it is today to get at the oil.

I believe once the EROEI gets below 10:1 the reserve is of little use as far as running western society as we know it. Certainly you could use it to fund a military venture etc, but to expect 10:1 oil to take corn from planting stage to tinned on the supermarket shelf stage, forget it.

Most of the new reserves are of this 10:1 order, hence $100 oil still.

copious.abundance wrote:Recoverable running total year to date: 7.716 billion barrels minimum to 11.867 billion barrels maximum

Thus passes the oil finder into history.

I could see it a lot better in graph form, but when even the oilfinder is showing lower oil finds as the trend you know things are getting iffy.

Tanada wrote:I could see it a lot better in graph form, but when even the oilfinder is showing lower oil finds as the trend you know things are getting iffy.

If he put all his info in a spreadsheet and wrote up a report with some nice colourful charts, I bet he could sell copies for fancy prices like IHS-CERA does.

Tanada wrote:I could see it a lot better in graph form, but when even the oilfinder is showing lower oil finds as the trend you know things are getting iffy.

I didn't put as much effort into looking for discoveries last year as I did in other years, so, while I can't be certain, I suspect if I had made more of an effort I would have found more discoveries. For example, I made no effort at all to look for unconventional shale discoveries/reserve additions that I had cataloged a fair amount of in 2012 and 2011. How much more that might have been, I have no idea.

But somewhere around the spring I started thinking the project was getting tedious, so every day after that I just did quick-and-dirty searches to find announced discoveries. The only one which required a bit more reading of an article than the other ones was the addition to Libra, and in that case I only stumbled across it almost by accident while I was reading some other article.

NYT article on the PO news page:

The biggest oil find in the world last year occurred in deep waters off the coast of Newfoundland.

Was that really the biggest? :

Statoil (OSE:STL, NYSE:STO) Canada and co-venturer Husky Energy have announced that the first Bay du Nord exploration well has discovered between 300 and 600 million barrels of oil recoverable.

A week's worth.

Keith – And not anytime soon: “Geir Richardsen, Statoil Canada’s vice-president of exploration, says follow-up plans include acquiring additional 3-D seismic surveys and drilling of exploration and appraisal wells in the largely unexplored Flemish Pass Basin. Depending on those results, the Bay du Nord discovery could be producing light crude sometime after 2020.”

And it won’t be delivering global consumption for a week. Based on the production rates of comparable fields in the trend it will come on around 50k to 100k bopd. IOW in 6 years (or longer) this “giant field” might add 0.1% to the global oil production rate. Dang…I can hear the oil futures crashing now. LOL.

BTW I would take those reserves estimates with a huge grain of salt: "... acquiring additional 3-D seismic surveys and drilling of exploration and appraisal wells". Remember I'm the geologist that watched the first 5 "low risk development" wells in my new GOM field at Mobil Oil come in as dry holes or non-commercial. Reduced the reserves from 25 million bo to 1 million bo and from 125 bcf to 25 bcf.

F*cking exploration geologists. LOL.

"It appears that the biggest single oil discovery in 2013 was less than 1 billion barrels in size"
Global Oil Supply: the decline rate problem
19 March 2014

Charles Whall and Tom Nelson, Co-Portfolio Managers of Global Energy, believe the market has been complacent about oil supplies for too long. The white paper analyses the decline rate problem and the significant investment opportunities that derives from this analysis.

Despite a very poor decade of exploration drilling and very limited production growth even allowing for sharply rising industry capital expenditure, commentators continue to talk about comfortable oil supplies and long-term oil price weakness. Charles and Tom think that there are fundamental industry and geological trends that are being misunderstood and which will lead to a tightening oil market.

Contents
Consistent optimism about new supply growth 3
Investment opportunities 4
Fundamentals of reservoir behaviour and oil extraction 4
Depletion rates and production decline 5
Are high depletion and decline rates a good or a bad thing? 6
Case studies 6
Tight oil in North America 9
Why are new fields likely to decline faster? 9
Oil field contract and fiscal terms also play a role in depletion 10
What do the decline rate studies tell us? 11
What are the implications for the oil industry? 12
Can technology save the day? 14
Investment opportunities 15

Anyone have any good data on what was discovered in 2014? Without spending time looking it up it seems as if everyone concentrated on development without much in the way of exploration, but that could just be a false impression.

copious.abundance wrote:For reference, here are the totals for the previous years I posted 2 pages ago:

2012 Totals:

Recoverable Total: 22.596 billion barrels minimum to 26.876 billion barrels maximum
OIP Total: 9.3 billion barrels minimum to 9.7 billion barrels maximum

------------------------------------

2011
Total discoveries listed as recoverable: 11.581 billion barrels minimum to 14.281 billion barrels maximum
Total discoveries listed as Oil-In-Place: 300 million barrels minimum to 300 million barrels maximum
2010
Total discoveries listed as recoverable: 41.577 billion barrels minimum to 44.873 billion barrels maximum
Total discoveries listed as Oil-In-Place: 91.26 billion barrels minimum to 92.8 billion barrels maximum
2009
Total discoveries listed as recoverable: 12.009 billion barrels minimum - 18.731 billion barrels maximum
Total discoveries listed as Oil-In-Place: 13.514 billion barrels minimum - 15.069 billion barrels maximum
-----------------------------------
2008: 24.009 billion - 27.758 billion barrels
2007: 32.32 billion - 36.85 billion barrels
2006: 10.65 - 25.9 billion barrels

/catalog.

So the world consumes 30-35 billion barrels every year, correct? Presuming all of these discoveries come in as the maximum recoverable and didn't get revised either up or down since they were announced only 2007 and 2010 discovered more recoverable oil than we consume in a year, while 2009 and 2011 came in very low, more than balancing the two high years.

Are there any verified figures for 2013/2014?

And to just state the obvious: how much new proven oil reserves are added to the books every year has no bearning on how much new production will come on line or to what degree it might offset declining production.

Also good to remeber that with the drop in oil prices 100's of million if not billions of bbls of previous proved producible reserves have been automaticly reclassified as proved NONPRODUCIBLE reserves. IOW the global proved reserve count just took a huge leap BACWARDS in the last couple of months.

Quinny wrote:Are there any verified figures for 2013/2014?

The closest thing might be reserve reports according to US SEC rules:
http://www.sec.gov/divisions/corpfin/gu ... interp.htm
Other countries may have different rules.

I don't know if this is compiled anywhere (with "new discoveries" separated). It would probably lag oilfinder's press releases by a couple of years.

It is very unlikely we can find an oil field the size of Ghawar at this point in time. The world has already been thoroughly explored for oil. It is highly unlikely we could miss an oil field the size of Ghawar during the past decade of extensive searching, especially with the advanced technology we have nowadays.

I suspect that the discoveries of oil resources is quite significant over the years, but what the world really needs is reserves of oil. It's finding stuff that can be extracted at a price that is viable that matters.

The viable price is of course variable to say the least!

DesuMaiden wrote:It is very unlikely we can find an oil field the size of Ghawar at this point in time. The world has already been thoroughly explored for oil. It is highly unlikely we could miss an oil field the size of Ghawar during the past decade of extensive searching, especially with the advanced technology we have nowadays.

On that I agree with you completely.

vtsnowedin wrote:

DesuMaiden wrote:It is very unlikely we can find an oil field the size of Ghawar at this point in time. The world has already been thoroughly explored for oil. It is highly unlikely we could miss an oil field the size of Ghawar during the past decade of extensive searching, especially with the advanced technology we have nowadays.

On that I agree with you completely.

All of the easy to reach oil has been found already. All of the low-hanging fruits have been discovered already. We've already discovered at least 95% of all of the oil there is on the planet. Whatever is left to discover and exploit is always in smaller quantities and is always harder to extract because it is always going to be a small pocket of oil in a hard-to-reach area. Back in the 1940s to 1960s, we were discovering huge pockets of easy-to-reach oil like Ghawar, and these oil fields are still in production. But these major oil fields are now in decline in production, and the discoveries we are making from this point on are not going to be able to make up for this decline. We are now discovering only 1 barrel of oil for every 6 to 8 barrels we use.

We've recently discovered oil off the sedimentary basin of Brazil's Atlantic Coast. It is an estimated 10 billion barrels of oil, which sounds like a lot of oil. It sounds like the world is saved! Great news. Except 10 billion barrels only lasts for 4 months for the entire world's oil consumption. And the oil is found in waters that are 2 to 3 miles deep. We had the BP OIl Spill in the Gulf of Mexico 5 years ago. And it happened because we were drilling in 1 mile of water. That was difficult enough. We already had a huge accident drilling in 1 mile of ocean water. Now we need to drill in 2 to 3 miles of ocean water, which is probably impossible at this point. And even if it was possible to reach this oil, it wouldn't be worth it since it is only a 4 month supply for the entire world. The amount of effort required to obtain this oil is so high and the rewards so low that the discovery is pointless in the grand scheme of things. When you expend more energy in oil production than the amount of energy you get from using the oil, then it becomes a fruitless endeavor. That's what is happening here. The diminishing rewards for oil production in new fields means these new fields are not even worth production.

We already reached peak of oil discoveries around the world in 1964. That was more than 50 years ago. And ever since, we have been on a gradual decline in oil discoveries. So it is no surprise the peak of production will come sooner or later. And the peak of production is happening right now. All of the mega oil fields are now in decline, and the recent discoveries are only a drop-in-the-bucket, unable to make up for the decline. And by the way, 4/5 of all of the oil we are now using is from oil fields discovered before the 1970s. And ever since the early 1980s, we started extracting oil at a faster rate than we were discovering it.

Donlan - "It's finding stuff that can be extracted at a price that is viable that matters." Which is exactly the point I was trying to make above. For years the MSM et al spared no effort to highlight the gains made in proven oil reserves. Yes...RESERVES...not resources. But recall what it takes to move from a resource category to a proved reserve status: technically recoverable at CURRENT oil price. In the last few months the world's PROVEN OIL RESERVES have declined by many BILLIONS of bbls. Of course the pubcos and govts aren't anxious to let the public in on the change. But if prices stay relatively low the rest of the year US pubcos will be forced to post those loses as required by law. NOC's won't so we won't see such numbers from them. But it will still be obvious when tracking their drilling activity: one does not drill for FORMALLY proved oil reserves...only the ones that are still commercially viable. And we have lost a huge percentage of the reserves added to the world's proved oil reserve scorebook. And yes: we'll add them back one day. Good news...bad news: they'll come back when oil gets back to $100/bbl.