WatchVenezuela’s proven reserves are now the biggest
June 14 2012 at 05:00am
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Venezuela now holds the largest proven oil reserves in the world, overtaking Saudi Arabia, according to BP.
The country’s deposits were at 296.5 billion barrels at the end of last year, surpassing Saudi Arabia’s 265.4 billion barrels, BP said yesterday in its annual Statistical Review of World Energy. The 2010 estimate for Venezuela was revised to the same amount, up from 211.2 billion in the previous report.
One reason for the revisions was that the company published its report in June, before most governments issue their annual reserves figures, said Robert Wine, a BP spokesman. Last year’s record average oil price also had an effect, increasing the commercial viability of hard-to-reach deposits, he said.
Venezuelan reserves account for 17.9 percent of the global total, with Saudi Arabia’s share at 16.1 percent. Canada ranks third with 10.6 percent of the worldwide total. – Bloomberg
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46 male
Menlo Park, CA
Why is it that places with basically no democracy or human rights (Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Venezeuela) have all the oil?
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Clearwater, FL
Probably because the developed countries used up all of theirs already. The faster we use up oil though, the less we'll be dependent on it. Cheap oil prices are preventing slightly more costly alternatives from taking off.
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Patrick says
because big corporations would rather deal with a dictator or corrupt ppl than a responsible democracy. they let them rape the environment,pollute the rivers and steal
Also Oil seems to be concentrated in areas where there is not much agricultural area(there by poor)
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FloridaBill says
Good point.
Repubthug says
That works until the dictator nationalizes the corporation's assets.
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Well then, they must have WMDs as well.
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lol
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Bet that shakes the neighbors up near Argentina knowing that that trouble is in the region. Got to do something even if its wrong lol. Yumpin yemmni lol.
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Repubthug says
Exactly. Without the dictator you can't pull up oil and pay the nation on top of it pennies per barrel. Only dictators make such lousy deals, then funnel those pennies into the offshore banking system for themselves, theif families, and the military leaders who keep the people terrified and living in perpetual poverty.
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Patrick says
Because we want it that way, Patrick.
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HRHMedia says
That peak only applies to Texas oil reserves. The peak for Saudi Arabia was in 2000.
Daniel Yergin on Oil. To be clear, crude oil, natural gas, shale, etc, are all finite resources. Thus, nobody can deny peak oil. What Yergin is really saying is that we're not there yet. I think he's a little on optimistic side.
Furthermore, Yergin seems to consider all forms of oil as oil. If you narrow the definition to cheap oil, then yep, we had just passed the peak. Canadian tar sands, shale oil, and the like are more expensive to extract.
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tdeloco says
That's the thing. Oil is sort of a "spectrum" ranging from the good "light sweet crude" down to the crappy "tar sand." Naturally the good-quality, easy-to-extract stuff is used first, then there is a steady shift toward the bad-quality, hard-to-extract stuff.
Given that fact, it's hard to say what the shape of the global oil production curve will look like. The economics are different for a single well than for the planet as a whole.
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FloridaBill says
Precisely. Developed nations have better human rights (usually), and they also have higher and earlier energy demands, so they eat up all their dinosaur remains quickly.
The only thing I'd ad is that in countries where human life is cheap, the environment is also disposable, so there are more drilling opportunities. When life is cheap, you don't care about poisoning the drinking water of the slave labor.
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The thing about all carbon fuels is that the money we save today by burning them is only a fraction of the money we'll be spending sequestering carbon in the future in order to protect our populations and our territory. It's really small short-term profits against large long-term costs. And human crowds make really bad decisions.