Steven Lynch's opinion piece published in the August 25 edition of the New York Times, “Peak Oil Is a Waste of Energy,” contends that there is no danger of near-term decline of production rates because great volumes of oil are believed yet to be discovered. This simplistic view fails to recognize that an aging handful of giant and super-giant fields (only 320 of the world's 16,000 oil fields) provide nearly 60 percent of global oil supply. We provide an alternative view that field size, not just total undiscovered volumes, will determine future production rates and costs.
Regardless of the claims of the U.S. Geological Survey and others of a trillion barrels of undiscovered oil, let's look at the recent history of finding giant and super-giant fields. The consistency of their contribution is largely the result of increased rates of extraction, not to new discoveries. As time passes, new discoveries are increasingly smaller, of lower quality and located in ever-more difficult operating environments.
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