LAS RESERVAS DE PETRÓLEO, SIGUEN CRECIENDO. No se preve escasez. No hay pruebas para una crisis...
Energy: Global warming doomsayers have a mirror canard of doom in the peak oil theory, suggesting that the world is running out of oil. So is it? Not with countries like Brazil still not even done discovering it yet.
Related Topics: Energy / Budget & Tax Policy.
Last week came news that Brazil may be sitting on even bigger oil deposits than the huge Tupi field discovered just last month. According to Bloomberg News, if a geological formation beneath a two-mile layer of salt in Brazil´s Santos offshore basin is oil-bearing, it may hold "significantly more" crude, says Gustavo Gattass, an analyst with UBS Pactual in Rio de Janeiro.
That´s no small thing — Tupi alone almost doubled Brazil´s oil reserves and may raise Brazil to the rank of 10th biggest oil producer from 17th currently. Awed at the good fortune, Brazil´s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva sighed: "God must be Brazilian."
Adictos al Petróleo... (I Parte) (Aprovechando la energía de las mareas)
Wait a minute. Wasn´t oil supposed to be running out? Wasn´t all the oil out there already discovered? If this new "Sugar Loaf" field in Brazil pans out, the world oil picture won´t be the same.
Brazil will become an even bigger exporter in a decade or so than projected and could put pressure on the club of petrotyrants that now has a monopoly on resources. Best of all, it throws doomsday assumptions about oil "peaking" on its head.
¿Existe escasez, o realmente existe una gran especulación estudiada para mantener los altísimos precios al consumidor?
The world produces about 85 million barrels of oil a day, according to the International Energy Agency. Global energy demand is expected to rise 55% from 2005-2030. Peak oil theories abound that new discoveries are not keeping up with oil usage. But it´s significant that the new demand also is fostering big new discoveries, largely from the very countries where demand is growing most.
Peak oil advocates claim that the world is running out of oil unless the West gives up its energy-consuming lifestyle. Like global warming and population-bomb Malthusianism, it´s essentially junk science because it operates on a static model. Crucially, it leaves out the politics of whether oil companies are allowed to discover or not.
Might the recent shortage of new oil on the market have something to do with bans on offshore drilling, as in the U.S.?
Might this lack of new oil have something to do with the fact that less-efficient state oil ownership has grown globally to 80% of all reserves, while countries such as Venezuela have begun seizing private oil properties?
Might the fact that big emerging markets need oil badly and don´t know where to get it motivate them to find more themselves?
Believing in their potential and determined to get rich, these countries are the ones making some of the most dramatic new energy discoveries this year. Besides Brazil, China has made 10 major new discoveries this year alone. Its Bohai Bay discovery last May, its largest in four decades, added 7.35 billion barrels of reserves. India, once viewed as an energy no-hoper, is also finding energy offshore, and Russia already is a major producer making itself bigger.
Meanwhile, last year Mexico made a huge offshore discovery it has yet to tap. And in the tiny area where U.S. energy companies are permitted to drill offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, Chevron, Statoil and Devon Energy made the biggest discovery since the Alaska Prudhoe find decades ago, called "Jack 2." It´s so big it could add 50% to the U.S. 29 billion barrels of domestic energy reserves.
"The world is not running out of oil," said Daniel Yergin, head of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and one of the world´s leading oil experts, in a recent interview with Les Echos in Paris.
Yergin noted that technological breakthroughs also are enabling the production of more energy. Not only can new technologies recover resources from old wells previously thought tapped out, it can create oil from formerly useless resources, like tar sands. It also can recover oil and natural gas from previously impossible geography, like the deep blue sea miles beneath the surface — which will be Brazil´s challenge.
Brazil´s discovery isn´t just wonderful news for Brazil — it´s a lesson for the West. Not only is there more oil out there than doomsayers claim, but it takes political will to ignore the naysayers and get out there and discover more.
The best part about Brazil´s will to drill is it exposes the peak oil crowd for what it is: a group with a radical agenda that has less to do with science than with expounding "Western guilt" about its economic success, which is built on oil. Emerging Brazil has no such qualms, and shows just how useless such hang-ups are.
* A toda la información relacionada desde Ibérica 2000, sobre las afecciones causadas por el petróleo... (http://www.iberica2000.org/Es/Busquedas.asp?Palabra=petroleo)(A numerosos artículos...)
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