24 July 2008

Phew! Saved.

Aye, well don't get your hopes up. The FT reports:
The Arctic holds as much as 90bn barrels of undiscovered oil and has as much undiscovered gas as all the reserves known to exist in Russia, US government scientists have said in the first governmental assessment of the region’s resources.
The report is likely to add impetus to the race among polar nations, such as Russia, the US, Denmark, Norway and Canada, for control of the region.
The US Geological Survey believes the Arctic holds 13 per cent of the world’s undiscovered oil, while 1,669,000bn cubic feet of natural gas is equivalent to 30 per cent of the world’s undiscovered gas reserves.

If it's undiscovered, how do they know it's there and how much of it is there?
The USGS report used a probabilistic methodology and included only undiscovered resources that could be exploited using today’s technology.

I think this means that they're guessing ...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Right, finding more oil will save us from climate change, economic chaos and the rest.

Same as building more roads saves us from congestion. And that one about virginity applies too.

You're right about the guess, though. I particularly like X made-up figure is equivalent to 30% of Y made-up figure.

Thing is, even the so-called recoverable reserves are pure guess as well, inflated OPEC figures in particular (the larger you inflated your reserves the more you got to sell).