patrick.net

Tenpoundbass says

No but the basic elements are already there along with the hydrogen and carbon needed to produce crude.

The truth is Oil is being renewed faster than we're being led to believe. Oil fields in Texas that were dried up by the 50's were back on line just 50 years later.

Nope, in TX they just have better technologies so they can extract what they left in ground 50 yrs ago. This is related to my job to some extent as most my students work for Big Oil. Don't believe everything Breitbart tells you - they are just as incompetent in science and technology as liberal websites, just less annoying :)

Patrick says

Proven oil reserves keep going up and not down.

The investment bank Simmonds and Company explains it this way: "Despite an oil-field technology revolution, estimating reserves is still akin to actuarial estimates of [the] remaining years in a human life -- a scientific guess."

In any event, in oilman's language the term "proven reserves" has a somewhat elastic meaning. Under the scale known as OOIP -- original oil in place -- proven reserves are those estimates with a 90 percent probability of being correct. And this category only applies to oil fields that are already producing.

The next category below that are estimates with an 80 percent probability of being correct, in cases where the field is known but not yet developed. And so on, downward, to the high-risk estimates that give only a 20 percent probability of being correct.

And difficulties of geology apart, politics can enter into the equation, too. Governments can unwittingly or knowingly exaggerate the extent of their resources. The bigger the resources, the more clout the nation has in the world, and the greater the chance of attracting investment. Take Mexico as an example.

"For many years its reserves were reported as being 50 to 60 billion barrels, and then they had auditors and others from outside, and they reduced that to 20 to 30 billion," Takin says. "And then, in order to attract investment they had to go to an even more restricted and definitive evaluation of reserves, [namely the standard] according to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission."

The result was that Mexico's reserves were in the end estimated at below 20 billion barrels -- only one-third of the Mexican government's original evaluation.

http://www.payvand.com/news/08/oct/1171.html

Take into account when reading sources such as "oilprice.com" in the last two weeks it has been reported the largest oil field in Saudi Arabia is being depleted faster than first thought, another report the Saudis have more oil than ever, shortage of natural gas on Monday - surplus on Friday, same for any other commodity. API (American Petroleum Institute) is no angel and it would behoove one to read the book shown in the image below.



As per the comments from southern Florida refiners can determine what they want to make - jet fuel, gasoline, etc. and no the oil is not magically replenishing itself 50 years or less which was noted by d6rB

Old oil and gas fields do get refilled quite frequently. Liquid and gaseous hydrocarbon have lower density than rocks, so they get pushed up due to displacement; it's the same reason why we get out-gassing of methane on Mars, volcano eruptions on earth (due to methane ejection, melted rocks / lava wouldn't explode upward by themselves as they are liquids and solids, not compressible like gas such as methane), methane ice crystals at the bottom of the ocean (accummulated out-gassing from ocean floor) and sometimes massive methane bubbles in the sea that sink ships, as well as the oozing out of petroleum in Pennsylvania and Texas. In parts of Pennsylvania and upstate NY, it was well known that water from private water wells filling the bathtub could often lead to lighting a fire on top of the water due to the dissolved methane coming out of the water as the water temperature rises in the tub (compared to temperature under ground in the water well), long before the shale drilling technology.

The reason why "petroleum reserve" has always been about 30 years since petroleum found industrial use in the 19th century (instead of being pollutant ruining good farm land as they oozed out of ground on their own), is because finding cheap tapping point costs money (capital intensive in the initial geological searching/prospecting process; you wouldn't want to sink millions of dollars into the ground only to find someone else can drill nearby for less than you do and then sell oil/gas cheaper than you can). So when there is about 30yrs of worth of finds waiting to be tapped, the industry slows down / cancels the search/prospecting prrograms. That's why oil drilling / finding equipment companies like Schlumberger are highly cyclical. Due to the refilling process mentioned above, an existing well often produce more than initially estimated volume, so eventually leading to oil price depression, further depressing investment in prospecting . . . which after a few years of course leads to higher prices due to dwindling "reserves." Then as oil prices go up on rumors of "running out of oil!" more money is put into oil prospecting and drilling of new wells. The cycle starts again.

The overall situation is a little like "housing shortage": not because of the world running out of houses or "Peak Houses," but because empty houses unused for long would deteriorate (and builder wouldn't be able to pay interest and tax on empty houses) so houses are only built when there is (expected) sustainable market demand. All the regulations only make the suppliers all the more cautious and less competitive with each other when it comes to new builds.