Global Oil Discovery

From PeakoilWiki

Once the economic importance of oil was understood (due to the onset of the Automotive Era and also use of oil as a strategic fuel for military equipment such as naval vessels), serious efforts to locate petroleum deposits were undertaken.

Early explorers were able to "discover" oil fields using relatively crude tools, and by observing surface features, and in fact, most of the early oil deposits were so huge, and sufficiently plentiful that relatively unsophisticated techniques could be used to find them.

The world's largest oil field, Ghawar, in Saudi Arabia, was discovered in 1934, for example.

As discovery techniques improved, and as use of oil became even more widespread, the rate of oil discovery increased. The decade of maximum oil discovery was the 1960's, and then began to decline. Reason: all of the "easy" and "giant" oil fields were found. It became more and more difficult to find new commercially viable oil fields. Even with increasingly sophisticated tools, and despite high levels of financial investment, the rate of discovery of new oil fields has never reached the level of the 1960's, and in fact, discovery of new oil has been only been between 10 and 50% of annual consumption for the past 20 years.

The "global discovery curve" is illustrated below. The estimated oil discoveries for 2006 were estimated to be between 10 and 15 billion barrels of oil. The bulk of these discoveries were in hard-to-reach places such as offshore, deepwater, and various politically inhospitable places.