Have we underestimated total oil reserves?
Date: Monday, June 16, 2008 @ 20:37:56 UTC
Topic: General
11 June 2008/ From New Scientist Print Edition
Black gold might not be as scarce as we thought. This week oil prices escalated to a record $139 per barrel, but that may partly be because the amount of available oil in known reserves has been significantly underestimated.
So says Richard Pike, a former oil-industry adviser and chief executive of the UK Royal Society of Chemistry, who blames flawed statistical calculations.
Oil companies produce a bell-shaped probability distribution for how much each oil reservoir might hold, and then quote as an indicator of the reservoir's capacity a figure they are 90 per cent certain they can exceed. When publishing a result for multiple reservoirs, they simply add up the figures for each one. And this is where the problem lies...
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