– This year has started where 2015 ended, with low volumes of discovered conventional resources,says Product Manager Nils-Henrik Bjurstrøm in Rystad Energy.
During the first four months of 2016 only some 2500 million boe were discoverd. This compares with the 10 billion barrels of o.e. discovered last year and 26 billion barrels o.e. in 2012.
It is also noteworthy that more gas than oil is being discovered.
– In April 2016, the largest field discovered was the deepwater Katambi in the Block 24 in Angola, and with 850 milllion barrels o.e. this is the largest gas-condensate discovery for Angola in the past decade. The Katambi discovery made by BP is the southern-most discovery of Angola, where the infrastructure is currently underdeveloped, says Bjurstrøm.
Global #oil discoveries fell in 2015 to 63-year low (and 68-year low excluding US #shale) @RystadEnergy data pic.twitter.com/S0qBG2CpMN
— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) May 23, 2016
1 kommentar
Most interesting and revealing and the question is then – what next concerning the oil price?
There can be no doubt concerning this overall long term trend of reducing discovered resources and increasing consumption of oil and natural gas – give or take some minor uncertainties.
A low oil price is certainly not helping exploration and the gap widens for this reason also.
What is of major importance is that the increase in consumption of fossil fuels is steady, despite all the media frenzy over renewables.
Continued populating growth and increased standards of living ensures that the world-wide energy consumption will continue to increase.
Sectarian and religious issues on the back drop of democratic principles means that no single group wants to be smaller in “democratic-significance” than rivaling groups. This “Balance-of-Democracy” translates into an increasing world population.
This effect of population growth, together with increasing consumption (of services and goods) – which is one of the main vehicles for economic growth (e.g. now in China which is mowing from “Export-Oriented-Growth” to “internal-consumption-driven-growth”) – means that the increasing world population demanding “a better life” will also have a steadily increasing energy demand.
An increasing span between supply and demand of fossil fuels can only mean that the oil price will at some time in 2017 really shot up high -like real high.
Long term, given a zero-interst world market and the problems this is now creating for Pension Funds, the turmoil within EU and the Middle-East, the Sovereign-Debt-Crisis, the “South-European Banking Crisis” – this all translates into uncertainty and uncertainty usually translates into higher prices for basic commodities i.e. higher prices for oil and gas.