Our new oil discoveries are getting smaller and smaller every year, and more and more costly to produce - exponentially
(A continuation of these blogposts on the same theme)
Mathematics is dead until one arrives at things like Peak Oil, the end of global net oil exports and the remaining conventional oil reserves (which are the petroleum reserves that really matters, the rest is too expensive to produce, and is becoming more so for every year - exponentially).
Then reality begins to be much more interesting than computer games, fantasy novels, science fiction novels, movies, opera and theatre.
Just take as an example the fact that global oil discoveries become smaller and more expensive every year (remember the "low hanging fruit principle" of Richard Heinberg, we exploit the cheapest stuff first). More and more of the discoveries are in unconventional oil, which is the more expensive, higher hanging fruit on the "oil tree".
Just look at this quote from this article in Oil & Gas Journal from 2019:
"Basins that are early in their life cycle—the frontier and emerging phases—have average discovery sizes 10 times greater than average discovery sizes made in the later, more mature basins. The average discovery size of these early life-cycle basins is 210 million bbl vs. 25 million bbl from mature basins discovered during the last 10 years."
This means that five years ago the average discovery size of new oil fields had varied from 210 mbd to 25 mbd during the last decade, 2009-2019. The world produces 101,8 mbd of oil (All Liquids) today, so 210 mbd is slightly more than two days of total global oil consumption today, and 25 mbd is about a quarter of our daily total global oil consumption.
Today the discovered fields are even smaller. I think they are becoming exponentially smaller (faster and faster). And exponentially more and more is unconventional oil (the amount of condensates and Liquified Natural Gas [NGL] is just soaring, more and more for every year, to make up for the shortfall in conventional crude minus condensate, which is declining, and has declined for a long time). In fact I have said before that conventional oil in very small fields is to be counted as unconventional oil, so expensive it is to produce, especially offshore. Very much of new oil discoveries are offshore. The onshore fields are thoroughly researched. Otherwise we would never have embarked on the extremely costly shale oil and tar sand fields in North America and Venezuela.
At the end of the day the new fields we find will be so small that they are uneconomical to produce, and we are very near that fateful time.
A lot of the recently reported new oil discoveries are not to be trusted. They often make wildly optimistic estimates of our future capability to exploit the newly found reserves economically, and they never take into account our exponentially growing debt bubble and the future collapse of civilization, which, for example, will make the remaining gigantic shale deposits and tar sands deposits worthless. If we cannot afford to produce the oil we find, because of economically hard times, because of wars and global heating, we do not have it in our reserves, cannot count them as reserves. This is why I focus so much on conventional reserves when I calculate our remaining oil reserves. This is very important to understand. All those who count unconventionals in our reserves, boasting with them, are making a really bad job. And this is in fact mainstream to do.
Remember that we have to afford the "Green Transition" too, and this will be just too much for us, plagued as we are by overshoot in all areas and a growing ecological collapse.
In this article from 2013, they said that India's oil reserves will last for only 20 years. Eleven years has passed, now we have 9 years left. Remember how many people that live in India. They will import oil as crazy over there.
End note
"Of the roughly 47,500 oil fields in the world, 507 of them, about 1%, are giant oil fields holding nearly two-thirds of all the oil that has ever been, or ever will be produced, with the largest 100 giants, the “elephants,” providing nearly half of all oil today. Since the 1960s, the world has consumed more oil than what has been discovered, and the average size of new oil fields has declined, leaving us heavily dependent on the original giant oil fields discovered over 50 years ago (Aleklett et al. 2012)" (from this blogpost by Alice Friedemann at the blog Energy Skeptic on May 16, 2020)
