Report: China makes major new oil find

[IDemo]

Offshore discovery could have reserves of 2.2 billion barrels

AP - Updated: 1 hour, 12 minutes ago

BEIJING - For 15 years, China's oil companies have scoured its territory for new oil sources, drilling in Central Asian deserts and the floor of the Pacific, hoping to reduce rising dependence on imports.

After years of disappointment, one company reportedly has made a major discovery.

PetroChina Ltd. has found an offshore field that could become China's biggest new domestic petroleum source in a decade, with reserves of 2.2 billion barrels, the official Xinhua News Agency said Wednesday.

The scale of the find, if confirmed, would be welcome news to the communist government. China became a net oil importer in the late 1990s and now is the world's No. 2 consumer after the United States, and consumption last year rose another 9.3 percent to 2.4 billion barrels.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17830653/from/RS.4/

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Well, that's the end of that crisis. Oh wait.... 2.2B/85M = about 26 days of global oil use. Assuming they actually have that much in recoverable reserves....

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. time to invade China

I mean, every little bit helps

[Javaman]

2. This amounts to a fart in a hurricane. nt

[hatrack]

3. Buy those guys a Tsingtao - the just found 1/6th of a Prudhoe Bay

Maybe . . .

[Dogmudgeon]

4. That's about 1-2% of the size of the Ghawar oilfield(s)

Ghawar has about 60-75 GBBL (billion barrels (is that the correct abbreviation?)) of oil, and is probably post-peak. Cantarell, Samotlor, and the other four or five megafields are all about ten times as large as the Chinese discovery, and most, if not all, are likewise in decline. The new Alaskan fields (ANWR) are five times as big. That will probably end up as the West's "safety net".

List of Oil Fields from Wikipedia (complete with references to the difficult-to-produce tar sand and shale fields).

There's probably some more undiscovered, easily-recovered oil. But not a whole lot.

--p!

[GliderGuider]

5. One month's worth of global consumption...

It will come on line in five or ten years, and will likely provide an average of a half-million barrels per day (about 6% of China's consumption) for the following decade.

And this is a BIG find - six one-thousandths of current global consumption for ten years. I hope people are getting the message about just how much trouble we're in with oil.