Russia's Oil Reserve Numbers Now A State Secret (BP Says Low Anyway)

[hatrack]

ST. PETERSBURG — "British Petroleum claims that Russia has oil reserves of 60 billion barrels. This very modest figure gives rise to the thought that it was no coincidence that a law declaring Russia's oil reserves to be a state secret came into force in February 2004. Russia's real oil and gas reserves have not proved to be as vast as the Russian political elite's fevered imagination would have had it. Given Russia's current export rates for oil resources, the country could well become an oil importer in the foreseeable future.

A map of supposedly classified oil reserves in the Barents Sea area. Bellona It was apparently for this reason that on November 11th 2003, President Vladimir Putin approved a change—encoded in special Federal Law No. 153—to Article 5 of the Federal Law On State Secrets. The change added the quantity and volume of reserves, methods, locations and amounts of extraction, production and consumption of Russia's strategically valuable fossil-fuels to the list of state secrets.

The list of natural resources that were classified was spelled out in the Russian Government's Special Decree No. 210 of April 2d 2002, which included "information on the balance of subsurface reserves of oil and gas dissolved in oil." It is however possible that the explanation is much simpler, and that because nobody can ever be entirely sure of anything in Russia— especially in such a dense field as geology—it was decided to classify reserve volumes of oil in order to avoid the headache of measuring them precisely. End of story.

EDIT

Interestingly, information on Russia's oil reserves appears regularly in British Petroleum's BP Statistical Review. According to the news agency Media-Press, a report citing BP that appeared on the web site RusEnergy on April 19th 2004, Russia has confirmed oil reserves of 60 billion barrels, and that it is extracting 7,698,000 barrels per day as of June 2003 with a consumption of 2,469,000 barrels. For the purposes of comparison, according to the SHANA agency, Iran has proven reserves of 130 billion barrels, an extraction of 3,729,000 barrels per day with a consumption of 1,350,000 barrels. This comparison is extremely depressing for the Kremlin's 'dreamers'— who therefore do indeed have something to hide."

EDIT

http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=communique&newsid=5631

[kalian]

1. Two words: PEAK OIL

Nough said...

[whistle]

2. This one slipped right by me.....

...Does anybody know if this claim is valid?

April 29, 2004
Saudis Triple Oil Reserves
The people at Peak Oil, who constantly predict that we're about to run out, must be really pissed at the lastest Saudi announcement.

WASHINGTON, 29 April 2004 — Officials from Saudi Arabia’s oil industry and the international petroleum organizations shocked a gathering of foreign policy experts in Washington yesterday with an announcement that the Kingdom’s previous estimate of 261 billion barrels of recoverable petroleum has now more than tripled, to 1.2 trillion barrels.
Damn. That's 939 billion barrels of recoverable petroleum. At 120 million barrels a day of world consumption that's over 21 years worth, and just from Saudi Arabia. Iran and other countries are making similar finds. Looks like we'll be inundated with oil for a long time to come, contrary to the prediction of lunatics like those at dieoff.org, who say things like this

Petroleum geologists have known for 50 years that global oil production would "peak" and begin its inevitable decline within a decade of the year 2000. Moreover, no renewable energy systems have the potential to generate more than a fraction of the power now being generated by fossil fuels.

In short, the transition to declining energy availability signals a transition in civilization as we know it.
Awww… Is Chicken Little feeling a little blue today? *sniff*

The Saudis continue with this little tidbit, so I say it's time to take a horn honking SUV drive around the block a couple times, just for the hell of it.

Additionally, Saudi Arabia’s key oil and finance ministers assured the audience — which included US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan — that the Kingdom has the capability to quickly double its oil output and sustain such a production surge for as long as 50 years.
Maybe the deep-earth gas theory is correct after all. We've known for decades that existing Saudi fields are filling back up from somewhere, and the Russians have written about a thousand papers over the past fifity years arguing that oil doesn't come from primordial life but is merely trapped hydrogen and carbon like you'd find on any planetary body. I mean, you'd expect the first and fourth most abundant elements in the solar system to show up somehow, and the thermodynamically stable form of carbon and hydrogen a hundred or so kilometers down is in fact petroleum. All this may be true, or maybe not, but it's certainly interesting.

[hunter]

3. It looks better on the loan applications...

A lot of my neighbors now owe half a million dollars on houses they bought for $150,000 or less. I wonder how much Saudi Arabia owes on its house... Can they really sell enough oil to make the payments? Do you think they could ever go "upside down?"

It's something to worry about before you drive your SUV around the block.

[hatrack]

4. The Saudis need to put down the hash pipe and deal with it

Deep-earth gas "theory" is a crock of shit, and in the runup to the Gulf War II in spring 2003 the Saudis, working flat-out, could only put out 9.2 mbd, far, far below estimates that it could handle 10.5 or even 12 mbd.

Ghawar's south end is blowing one hell of a lot of water, and the fact that they've had to put in something like 250 horizontal wells just to maintain production there, along with a huge EOR operation, over the last ten years is not encouraging.

If the Saudis are going to trumpet their New Improved Oil Reserves with amazing Shortfall-Removing Hydrocarbons (just as most of the Gulf states did in the late 1980s, when OPEC changed its pumping quotas based on proven reserves, let's see them step up to 12 mbd, or maybe even 15. Let's see them do it.