Diminished Expectations | Green Energy News

January 4, 2004 – Vol.8 No.41

DIMINISHED EXPECTATIONS.

No head of state, no corporate leader will ever stand behind a podium and declare that the world is running out of oil.

If he or she did, stock markets would panic and crash.

The price of oil futures would skyrocket.

Instead, government agencies, and others who analyze oil supplies from outside the industry, must rely on data supplied by the industry itself as well as news reports and anecdotal evidence to determine when crude oil will cease to be an economically viable source of energy. It’s those others that will have to break the news. (We will never really run out of oil. It just gets more and more difficult, more expensive to get.)

Here’s a bit of anecdotal evidence that apparently sent shock waves though the oil industry.

Royal Dutch Shell this week said it was reducing its figures for proven oil and gas reserves by 20 percent. In other words it has less proven reserves in inventory than previously thought or stated. The company moved the holdings into a category of scope and recovery with the hope that they will be moved back into the proven pumpable reserves category once the holding’s commercial viability was determined.

Do other companies really have the proven reserves they say they have?