GLOBAL FUTURE ANALYSIS
ENERGY | RESERVES
Global carbon energy reserves are severely overrated/inflated. This done for OPEC quota reasons: if you're allowed only to pump up a certain percentage of your reserves: you start to produce inflated reserves figures, something that's done in the last part of the '80ties (caused by the Saudi swing capacity on request of the USA to break the back of the USSR economic as last/final/effective Cold War strategy: it robbed the USSR from its international purchase power) when oil prices where so low the national budgets if the oil countries came in danger. An other reason for this overrating/inflation of reserve figures is that it's convenient for international loan acquisition (the more reserves, the higher the loans and the lower the interests). One of the things the WorldBank could do is just initiate a free to join international oil reserves auditing model. Countries than give voluntary an international auditing committee all the reserve data and gets an official reserves statement. The WorldBank could decide otherwise not to grand any loan anymore to countries who doesn't applies to this objective auditing. Not joining this yearly renewed auditing method will become equal to overrated reserve figures. A simple example: own national industry newsletters indicates that Kuwait has only 50% of the official stated reserves. Reserves figures has 3 categories: 1P has a 80-90% confidence of the possibility to explore, 2P has only a 50% confidence of the possibility to explore and 3P has only a 10% confidence of the possibility to explore. The world needs an audited tank meter (how much oil is left, how far can we drive), only gamblers drives a car when the contents of the tank is uncertain. We're now build on quick sand. Not much of a foundation. We are all gamblers. Gamblers with our future and the future of our children (we -just only?- say we love so much). We keep driving without any clue on reserves. And 3P is not a useful figure. We just must take the real reserves (as in 85% of 1p, 50% of 2P and 10% op 3P), and we need to know of these figures and the classifications are correct. Furthermore we don't only need quantity figures, but also quality figures and the net exploration figures must be stated (tarsand and shales use a lot of their own energy to produce a barrel of tradable energy). Than we will see that easy oil is running out and al the happy days are back again voices doesn't wreck the perspectives on any energy investment anymore. This is so important: energy investments will never get initiated as the should be, just because some no-no's keep talking that there is no problem. For the sake of the no-no's and for the sake of the future of the world economy and mankind the WorldBank should certainly initiate this auditing structure, with as bonus to the nations that joins it, a certain backup funding (insurer of the insurers) of an energy investment program. The whole reserve data status is beyond any intelligent way of thinking. So much for the wise Western World. We're just a bunch of wild west cowboys, hoping for the best. Smart on actual data based policies is nothing for us: than we maybe should start to change our way of life by ourselves and that's something we don't like: we rather face the smash against the wall: much more convenient now, but certainly much less convenient than. Of course oil exploration technology improves a lot, but basically it is no more than just pumping huge loads of seawater into oilfields. If this is done to fast it has a reverse effect (water is heavier than oil, but oil has a higher viscosity, the water must be injected low and slow). In Saudi Arabia the water injections in the oil fields has strong increased. A side effect of oil field exploration extension technology is the pumped up substance has an oil/water proportion. an oil field dies if the oil/water proportion starts to become only a few oil and almost all water and the recovery of the oil becomes to expensive. A few years (if the water has completely find it's way to the bottom of an oil field) the field has a short last production phase. Injections of air/gas is also an oil field recovering technology: gravity than works more direct: oil is pushed to the bottom on an oil field, but it has small local earth quake dangers attached to it, water injection doesn't have this danger. In Mexico a N (nitrogen) based gas injection technology is used to explore oil from the sharp (14%) declining Cantarell field maximal. Current status of carbon energy reserves: What is left of the global carbon energy reserves is very difficult to explore, heavy (not the light version we need: we need complete new refineries to deal with this type of oil), polluted (sulfur: we need large extensions to our refineries to extract the pollutions) and cost a lot of energy to extract (oil in tarsand and in shales are till only 20% energy effective: it takes 5 barrels equivalents to produce 1 commercial barrel).
Author: Gijs Graafland
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