How much technically recoverable oil and oil in place in the world?

[M. Doruk 0]

All the info they give about is proven reserves but I cant find any info about currently uneconomic ones. What is the amount of that oil and also how come arab nations reserves stay the same for last 40 years without any important discovery?

[Sebastian Meana + 278]

The answer is simple, nobody really knows...  There isn't correct answer

The Albertan oil sands have over a trillion barrells, the same happens to the orionoco belt, something similar to shale oil (not tight oil), or to methane hydrates, a guesstimate of the ammount of methane hydrates in the world is around 2 trillion tons to 530 trillion tons, (a ton is roughly 8 barrels) so that's a lot of gas right there

There's around 10,000,000,000,000,000 tons of kerogen material on the earth, which is the source matter of oil 



more likely the number is in the hundreeds of trillion of barrels, there's 500 billion ton of bacteria and half of that dies everyday in the oceans, only a tiny part of it will become oil or gas, but on the course of hundreeds of millions of years that tiny part becomes a lot of oil

Edited May 6, 2020 by Sebastian Meana

[0R0 + 6,251]

Look at the total geological resource. The EIA has reports on the matter. So does the USGS, and energy consultants like Rystad energy. We discussed their annual summary on the issue not long ago.

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-US-Cements-Its-Position-As-World-Leader-In-Oil-Reserves.html

You can search this forum for a discussion on that issue. 

 

[Eric Gagen + 713]

On 5/6/2020 at 3:55 AM, M. Doruk said:

All the info they give about is proven reserves but I cant find any info about currently uneconomic ones. What is the amount of that oil and also how come arab nations reserves stay the same for last 40 years without any important discovery?

This is a two part question, and I'll try to answer them seperately:

 

What is the volume of uneconomic reserves. 

This is what is called the volume of oil resources, and it's an estimate of how much hydrocarbon is in the ground.  The answer to this is a number so large that it's irrellevent to any useful discussion.  If in theory somehow we could wave a magic wand and recover all the hydrocarbons in the ground that we wanted and then actually used them the warming we would cause to planet earth would make venus look like an iceball.  It's an astronomical number.  The world as a whole has burned somewhere around 1.5 trillion bbls of oil since we started using it.  We have another 1.5 - 2 trillion bbls of oil available in reserves (known of economically recoverable oil in the ground. if you figure that recovery factor on already produced reserves and known reserves is around 30%, and the other 70% exists but is uneconomic, thats an extra 7 trillion bbls just right there.  The green river formation in Utah USA has around 3 trillion bbls in it (not currently recoverable at present prices) bring us to 10 trillion bbls.  This back of the envelope calculation excludes all shale resources, as well as the more esoteric stuff like coal to oil, gas to oil, or gas hydrates.  You can safely assume that the volume of uneconomic known and unknown resources is infinite from a human perspective.

 

How come Arab nations reserves stay the same for the last 40 years without any discoveries:

the short answer:  Production quotas.  Each OPEC nation gets it's production quota assigned to it more or less as a percentage of it's reserves each year. The bigger your reserve # is the more you are allowed to produce each year.  For a variety of political reasons the various OPEC nations defacto agreed to 'fix' their reserve basis numbers in the mid 80's and they haven't changed since.  There would be a LOT of money in it for the person who could get a realistic assessment of the actual state and condition of the major OPEC nations oil fields and systems.   

[carbonates + 22]

This is a long answer,  at times digressing from your question, so I apologize in advance for that. It is taken from an article I wrote a few years ago and I have updated it slightly to fit your question.

As of 2011 the International Energy Agency estimated PROVEN reserves of 1.7 Trillion barrels. They also reported that proven reserves (which have the highest certainty) have been rising since 1990, despite steadily rising demand and production. The IEA uses a standard for proven reserves very similar to the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC).

“They are generally defined as the portion of energy resources that can be recovered economically by using current technologies and for which a project has been defined. The amount of reserves depends on two factors that are key to defining a project: current hydrocarbon price and available technology. Reserves are further categorised as proven, probable or possible, depending on the degree of certainty.”

As you can see, they are estimating another 4.2 Trillion barrels as recoverable. The definition of recoverable reserves does not require that it be economic in the current market, and is not completely dependent on having available technology. There is yet another class of reserves that are not included in this number.

Now we are up to about 6 Trillion barrels of proven, recoverable, and ultimately recoverable. Keep in mind that different organisations used slightly different terminology and that different countries have different standards for defining these measurements.

Now as someone who has been involved in shale plays for the past couple of decades, and as a geologist whose job has been to find and estimate these reserves I can tell you that these numbers are still conservative. When Dr. Leigh Price in 1999 estimated the total amount of oil contained in the Bakken shale ranged from 271 to 503 billion barrels his work never got published by USGS and he passed away with the work unfinished. The most recent USGS estimate for the Bakken is only 7.4 Billion barrels. The original research was 36 times more oil at the low end of the range. This shows how much variation there can be in estimating the original oil in place. I have been present when government geologists gave presentations explaining that there was no oil to be found in a particular basin where I myself had recently estimated 6 Billion barrels. The difference is basically in how well the resource is understood, and how the technology for recovering it is understood. I had information that they did not have. That 6 billion barrels is still there, slowly being proven by a small drilling effort. There are hundreds of basins in the world that still have not been explored or evaluated by geoscientists with a direct understanding of unconventional resources. For these reasons, I am easily confident that the numbers for ultimately recoverable from IEA can be doubled and we are still in the range of reality.

How long these reserves will last is also a complicated question. Markets respond to scarcity or increased demand by either reducing consumption, or increasing production, or both. In reality both will happen, and it is very likely that we will never run out of oil and substitutes for it like natural gas. Just looking at improved efficiency of reservoir recovery, and looking at the 1.2 Trillion barrels already produced we can see easily how another 1.2 Trillion can come from those exact same reservoirs. Companies using carbon dioxide flooding and water flooding have been able to produce between 50–70% of the original oil in place. Primary production methods typically recover between 20–40%. Tertiary production may recover even more so in those existing fields all it may take is an engineering and geology effort to improve recovery. New techniques in secondary recovery from unconventional reservoirs are still being tested. New paradigms in geologic understanding of how oil is expelled from source rocks, where we have learned that expulsion that filled conventional reservoirs was actually very inefficient, have shown us that much of the oil ever formed on the planet remains in the source rocks where it first formed. We have only harvested the part that leaked out, and once the pressure in the source rock created by oil formation was relieved, the fractures closed back up and left significant amounts behind. 

Another major factor in how oil reserves work is called reserve growth. When a field is discovered it is often assessed and reserves are determined. A few years later a lot more is understood, and typically the reserve estimate increases. This can continue for many years, so that as the field produces, the estimate of the original reserves tends to increase. All of these processes of improved technology for recovery and production, and improvements in the science behind finding the resource are all driven by the market. The current low prices in the market for oil (<$30 per bbl) are the indirect result of the past high prices for oil (>$100 per bbl). The end result will be that as long as there is a demand and a price to support the cost of recovery there will be oil to be found. Current oil prices are probably going to cause major downward revisions in oil reserves, but keep in mind the oil didn't go anywhere, the cost of production just rendered oil uneconomic to produce. (See: Julian Simon - Wikipedia )

The chances of finding new reserves are quite good. New paradigms in the geologic understanding of how oil and gas are created and expelled from source rocks have already revolutionized the business in the past couple of decades. The new concepts that were applied to onshore drilling may eventually be applied to offshore drilling, looking for shales instead of sands. The “Peak Oil” crowd that proclaimed the peak in about 2006 were the group that never caught on to the new ideas. I have walked the halls where M. King Hubbert did his work predicting peak production and the ultimate decline, and he suggested using a multiple group of decline curves for his modeling but he did not anticipate that new drilling technology would release oil and gas reserves not even believed to exist at the time. Peak oil - Wikipedia The US just recently reached an all time high in oil production. So much for the peak  in 2006. Research and technology can and will find new resources. There are hundreds of geologic basins in the world that may seem to be explored, but they have not been explored with new ideas. For a few years now AAPG has been holding conferences extolling the virtues of Super Basins that are in the second and third rebirth of production. As long as we can find new ideas, we will have more resources.

Another factor, that is often seen as controversial, is that the Earth is still generating oil and gas. It didn't stop millions or even thousands of years ago, it is an ongoing process. We have had over 400 million years of deposition of organic materials, since living organisms became common on the planet and in the oceans. There are thousands of past depositional basins on the planet that were once beneath marine or lacustrine bodies of water. As these deposits are buried and move due to plate tectonics, they gradually, on a geologic time scale, heat up and change the organic material first deposited and preserved converting kerogen to oil and eventually to natural gas by thermal catagenesis. In other basins, heating is not even required, and natural gas is generated by biological organisms in producible quantities. Hundreds of these oil-producing basins, and the Permian is one of them, are still generating oil and gas because they have convertible kerogen in the thermal window where oil is forming. Many modern ocean basins today are depositing organic material in anoxic bottom waters at rates probably similar to parts of the past geologic record. The Black Sea is a modern day example, where most water below a certain depth is completely void of oxygen so organic material falling into that zone will not decay and will be preserved to someday be converted to oil. There are known examples, e.g. in the Gulf of California, where organic material deposited less than 5000 years ago has already formed oil. Based on the rate of formation of oil over the past 400 million years, I suggest that the planet could currently be generating about 36 billion barrels a year (that only means oil in place, not technically recoverable). That is only an educated guess and I would put wide error bars on that because there is so little actual data on source rocks. At the consumption rate before this current pandemic, we were using 36.5 billion barrels a year. We may eventually reach a rate of consumption of oil that actually matches the rate of formation. This idea tends to offend everyone who believes oil usage should be eliminated, but it is still a plausible possibility that the use of oil could actually be a sustainable process (not accounting for the carbon balance, just the formation and consumption). But I guess my answer to your question is, there is no fixed number of barrels of oil on the planet, because it is dynamic based on current natural processes that are creating oil and gas, as well as being dynamic as technology changes. 

As for the Arab nations' reserves, and any National Oil Company, they have no incentive to tell you their reserves. Don't expect to find it being published. Any numbers they release are politically influenced. The numbers usually in the public domain are estimated by international agencies working with limited information (and as I showed earlier, I don't even trust the USGS numbers). With the creation of Saudi Aramco as a publicly traded entity there is expectation that they will have to comply with SEC guidelines, making their estimation process similar to International Oil Companies. They reported 258 billion BOE for 2019 (201 Billion crude and condensate included in that) as reserves. I won't be surprised if those are revised downward based on current oil prices, but they have always claimed to have low production costs so they might not have to change much. They continue to find new discoveries, are always hiring talent from across the world, and have even been working in the unconventionals within their region for over a decade now.