Major Oil Find In Gulf

I'm going to pick a nit with you, Kate. Your stats are for 2004. In 2005, Norway dropped to ninth, behind (in reverse order) Canada, Venezuela, China, Mexico, Iran, the U.S.A., Russia, and Saudia Arabia. Link here (in pdf format).

if the gulf of mexico find proves out to be what is projected that is great but i fear not so good for the alberta oil sands.

The environmentalists (emphasis on the latter part of the word) will go well and truly nuts if this goes ahead. There's already a huge outcry about any drilling off the Florida coast.
Any idea where this is located within the gulf?

wrong stat, look at this one

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0872964.html

Well, the US might be the third largest producer today, but its proven reserves are pretty low, while Canada's reserves are ranked second only to Saudi Arabia. And the US consumes more oil than it produces, while Canada produces more than it consumes. So there's some justification for smugness, don't you think?

Justification for smugness? We didn't make the stuff.

That will not be an easy field to exploit.

>>

Imagine putting down about 2 Km of pipe and other infrastructure just to touch the sea floor before you start drilling, and keeping it in place when a hurricane hits.

Getting oil from tar sands sounds easy compared to the challenges they face.

uhhh y'all need to keep up with the papers!

big spreads in both globe and post biz sections, mapping out where the find is.

it's 230 miles south of New Orleans, south of the center of the oil production zone of Louisiana's territory of the Gulf. No Florida BS.

BTW there are great opportunities off of FLA and CA for oil, but currently banned, as well as ANWAR. Canada should have much more availability off of Mackenzie and St Lawrence outflows, but this is held up due to climate and crappy politicians. One easy way to figure out where oil is is to look at massive ancient rivers. This is why you're seeing oil development in Equatoreal Guinea, Sao Tome, etc... there's a confluence of rivers there and there are massive ancient fluvial beds.

Canada needs to deal with the idiotic governments in Atlantic Canada so as to fully develop its oil resources... As with anything economic, they can not be entrusted to manage these things appropriately, see Danny Williams, Bryan Tobin, etc.

The find is located approximately 230 miles south east of New Orleans in waters 3000 feet deep and drilled went thru subsea of 27000 feet. (Sorry for the distances in English I don't speak French very well)

Kate,

Those are 2004 statistics, but the pattern is correct the same in CIA Factbook records which indicate Canada is 12th behind Kuwait. The US is 2nd.
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2173rank.html

That's the thing about the reserves, there's no point in having them unless you can pump the stuff out.

An interesting table. I was particularily interested is Saudi Arabia's oil consumption. Is that an error? Can anyone shed some light on that?

There's also no point in pumping stuff unless you have something to pump... and we do.

And Canada's reserve data don't include a lot of the tar sands oil, which I'm told is, technically, a whole bunch.

Yep, thar's oil under all that water. Actually about 7,000 feet of water and 20,000+ feet of seafloor. Operative part of this discovery is while it will take time to get into production, knowing the oil reserves are there will take the edge off the panic crowd.
The interesting thing is that the advances in technology that are making this possible. Remember how horizontal drilling brought a mini boom?

Historically, natural resources have always become more plentiful. Recently, oil has looked like being an exception as warnings about passing the production peak have become more hysterical. Historically too, Big Oil's main concern has been to keep prices up by limiting production and persuading us that oil is in limited supply. Rockefeller got trust-busted for that a century ago; OPEC was created to curb oil production. As real oil prices have again risen to near 1981 levels, deeper drilling is again worthwhile. Advances in coal conversion technology are making coal a viable alternative to oil. I wonder if oil prices are not going to drift downwards again, way down. If drilling is allowed in such places as off the BC coast, said to hold large potential fields, (CONSPIRACY WARNING: is Big Oil behind the environmentalist-driven delays in developing West Coast oil? :-)) we might see prices plummet. It makes sense to use oil from unstable regions first, hence the priority on oil from the Arabian Gulf, but I like to imagine how much interest the Middle East will arouse when oil is back down to a few bucks a barrel.

20000 ft of sediment and still in the tertiary.less than 68 million years old.
lots left below that depth.
about one sixth the age of the Alberta Basin to the productive depth.

Before we start raving about the new find we should be looking in our own back yards to the vast amount of untouched resource we are standing on in Saskatchewan.

Don't be silly Franz. Everyone knows the oil stops at the border. ;-)

There are also lots of deep plays waiting to be discovered in the foothills. Shell's big gusher about 18 months ago was a good example: 5100m deep and about 500 billion to 800 billion cubic feet of raw gas.

The new Gulf discovery is great news, but in terms of increasing world petroleum reserves, it's no big deal. Even if the horseback estimate of "a 50% increase in U.S. reserves" proves to be true, half of a small number is still a small number, and depletion of petroleum reserves remains a global problem. Sure, we'll continue to find more. but with increasing difficulty and at increasingly high real cost. Ditto for a lot of known deposits which have been milked to the point that, although there is still some oil there, they won't properly be classified as "reserves" unless the price doubles again.

The bottom line is that, sooner or later, dependency on the resource will have to end - not in my lifetime, but probably in the lifetimes of my grandchildren.It's a finite resource and, as Will Rogers famously said about land, "They're not making any more".

I have some hope that mankind's well known ingenuity will solve the global energy problem before we hit the wall (if global conflict over oil supplies doesn't set us back to a campfire economy first)but, in the meantime, failure to take advantage of every practical approach, including development of a lot more nuclear-generated electricity for transportation purposes to preserve petroleum, would be just plain stupid.

I whine as much as anyone about the price of gasoline but, rationally, I accept that the increase was long overdue. It's already having an effect on North American consumption and further "marketplace rationing" with retail prices at or near European levels would, although painful, be helpful.

I started psuedoblogging this when gas was $1.45 a gallon:

-Sticker Shock-$3 a gallon gas? Some links--

I love the internet. A quick google gave me four different estimates of Canada's production and consumption figures, with rankings from 6th to 9th.

And I don't know about gas prices in Alberta, but here in Toronto, they were up over $1.10 a litre a few months ago, when oil was just below $80/bbl. Now, oil is down to - gasp - $70/bbl, and I'm seeing 70-80 cents/litre. So, the price of your raw material goes down by 10%, and the price of your finished product goes down 40%? Am I the only one thinking "WTF?!"?

YOur experiencing what is known as a downstream price aggressive environment... aka a price war in Ontario. We're paying low to mid .90's here in Alberta.

If whats going on down south is any indication, we should see even bigger breaks soonish... unfortunately.

So, Joe, is what we saw before an "upstream aggressive price environment" aka gouging?

This was a nice find. But yes it represents about 6 years of US oil consumption. So they need to find another 10 of these to really feel comfortable....5 would do ok....

There is lots more to find but the price of oil needs to stay up there and then the market does its magic, new technologies, newer finds etc.

There was a time when they thought we would run out of coal!

Anyway, the sooner we can stabilize the supply, either through reduction or security of supply the better off North america and Europe will be.

Then we will really havce to worry about a refugee problem as that part of the workd collapses further....

KevinB, Burlington is 75.9!
Gotta love that downstream price aggressive thing. I'm going to start pricing used Vettes again...

It is the strangest thing how apparently unexpected events come along to help out the oil companies. I recall back in the 70s where there was quite a buzz on the Club of Rome book or report about the end of oil, said then to be coming soon. Later we learned that no body really knew how much had been found because that information was "proprietorial" and the oil companies did not have to tell the government. Then it turned out some writers (let us not call them experts since even the word provokes a sneer these days) were saying there was lots because new technology was getting more out of each barrel of oil. They talked about BTU's and
drew steeply upward sloping graphs on future production. It was never clear exactly what they were measuring. Or whether production would catch up with even steeper price graphs.
Then the oil companies turned to quoting scientists, and when that went kind of sour they financed a big effort to make sure everyone knew how uncertain supply, climate, environment science, all this stuff was. I mean, if nobody knows it really is not fair to call for life sentences for oil company leaders is it? And then we started to get announcements on supply that suddenly appeared, or wild claims on what could be got out of Alberta. They don't tell you what has to be put in to get anything out, or whether we are looking at "projections" .
But all this time the cost of oil in the structure of our economic base rose pretty steadily. It is at a level now that would surely not have been believed, not so long ago. There is a lot of geopolitical activity on this account. You know, wars.

And now here is another story from the oil companies, who seem to have run out of lies people will believe. A new find! True, some knowledgeable individuals in the oil business say it wont change the price of oil one dime, it is a drop in the bucket and so on. But outside of the Tim Ball show, it seems that is all the oil hucksters have left. Can anybody say our government, or anyone, really knows what is down there. I didn't think so.

And then there is the really big question: has anyone measured, even roughly, just how many BTU's it will cost to get future BTU's to market? You know, after the Americans send their aircraft carriers, bomb the hell out of the oil producing area, invade the country, spend gazillions to secure the stuff and get it shipped back to the good old USA where it is consumed subject to vast waste and pumped into, you guessed it, SUV's used to shop in the mall.

Who knows, maybe the price will go so high it does make sense to get it out of Alberta sand, Colorado shale, or Jihad infested middle east locations. Sure.

But a great big new find freshly discovered? Tell us another one.

Now, oil is down to - gasp - $70/bbl, and I'm seeing 70-80 cents/litre???????

We were celebrating because we dropped to 1.08/litre. Something is seriously wrong when gas here, with a pipeline and refinery in town, is .30 more than Ont.

A few quick clarifications:

The major change in US production in 2005 had to do with lost capacity due to Katrina not to a change in reserves.

Norway has been dropping steadily as a producer as the North Sea oil fields wind down. This will continue for some time.

Estimates of oil reserves are incredibly variable as the definition for reserves involves a cost for recovery component (i.e. oil is only in the reserve if the cost to recover the oil is less than the cost of oil on the open market) as a consequence the huge amount of “oil shale” (like oil sands only different :) ) are not included in the US total. This explains why the total world reserves of oil have increased so much in the last few months ($70/bbl oil). For a more detailed discussed see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proven_oil_reserves

Regards

This will be the first of many, many deep water discoveries worldwide - and huge ones to boot.

We, on a global basis, have only recently consumed our trillionth barrel of oil. Proven and near-proven reserves worldwide are 2 to 3 three times that amount.

As for Canada's next great conventional discovery; Chevron's Orphan basin play offshore of NL could be as big as this one in the G of M. We won't know until the communist despot Danny Chavez Williams is overthrown. The major oil co's have all walked away from the area until there is regime change.

Yeah, just what is happening with offshore exploration in Canada? Everyone waiting for government handouts? There is so much potential out there but it always seems that it is only talk and/or an election issue in Atlantic Canada.

Danny Millions...well he can play chicken with the Oil Companies for a greater share, but at some point in time the rest of Canada is going to get tired of subsidizing him in his game of wait and see.....ie equalization payments.

Hey if you have an asset then cut the deal to develop yourself

Something is seriously wrong when gas here, with a pipeline and refinery in town, is .30 more than Ont.

dirtman, I heard some guy on Rutherford last week who said that Eastern Canada is getting surplus gasoline from Europe. That increases the supply which drives down the price. As there is no pipeline to send gasoline to the West, we don't see the same drops in price.

{Don't shoot me; I'm just the messenger. :)}

I agree with Hey and others. There is plenty of "energy" available for hundreds of years. It may be in forms that have to be modified, coal to gasoline for example, but there is enough oil, coal and uranium to last the whole planet well into the future.

What there is a lack of at present is refineries and power stations, thanks to the idiot enviro-mentalists.

As for the numb-skull politicians, as long as it doesn't hurt, then they go along with the enviro trash but when push comes to shove, economic growth and jobs, then we see, as an example in the UK, the politicos backing out. Good.

Personally, I'm tired of f**king around with oil-driven, coolant-cooled power sources.

Gimme plans for a 4 banger electric whammo engine for a reasonable price and I'll smile all the way into the sunset (far ahead of you), anyday.

Get over the oil, folks. It's been a blast and will continue to be, but only because that's what we have as a consumer choice.

The blood that comes with the golden-clear fluid has lost its appeal a long time ago, for me.

I find it pathetic on ALL the political party fronts that Canada isn't leading the world in the renewable resource sector. Talk about a quick way to turn things on their backside, worldwide.
If there was ever a country that was in the position to lead the way into sustainable energy sources, I'll be damned if there was a better one than Kanata.

Dare I dream of a government that doesn't have a "PLAN" for us all at election time...a party that can utilize the advantages of the modern world to communicate and actually realize the wishes of it's majority AND minority (it's not that hard to do, once we're all in the same ballpark, believe that or not) without falling prey to the popular vote, as we've all seen, time and time, again.

As a far "right" point-of-view site (according to mainstream opinion), I think the operator of this bulletin board would persuade far more Canadians to think independently if she could swallow a thousand rpm or two of pride and make the choice to speak to that many more people, such as myself.

You could stand to lose a few armchair war-mongering, dental-government-spy-implant-bearing-moonbat-comment posters.

It wouldn't hurt.

"according to mainstream opinion"
What site is that on jsaw?

And you can bet that the enviromentalists wackos will oppse drilling they will be out there in their garbage scow RAINBOW WARRIOR II and luanch their stupid zodiacs and make complete pests of themselves just like they always do i tell you GREENPEACE are the viggist trobblemakers ever