Oil and Gas Shortages? Not so Fast . . . "World hydrocarbon supply ‘relatively boundless'"

Okay . . . here's a bit of perhaps optimistic news from the Oil and Gas Journal: World hydrocarbon supply ‘relatively boundless,’ SEG told" :

Geophysical advances have contributed to the identification of a "relatively boundless supply" of oil and gas worldwide, Barry Smitherman, chairman, Texas Railroad Commission (RRC), told the Society of Exploration Geophysicists annual meeting Sept. 23.
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So much oil and gas have been located in unconventional formations worldwide that the so-called “Peak Oil” web site has shut down, Smitherman noted.

In fact, the web site of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, peakoil.net seems a bit - uh- musty. On the other hand, peakoil.com seems alive and well to me. Mostly wrongheaded, but alive.

I hope that Mr. Smitherman is right about that "relatively boundless" thing. Or right enough that we have time to perfect other energy sources.

UPDATE: Interesting financial (read "investment") thoughts from The Motley Fool America's Peak Oil Plan in Two Charts, increase (or hold steady) production, incentivize reductions in consumption and work on practical alternatives.

And, no, providing bicycles for every one in Houston will not work as a practical alternative.

Who is "Big Oil?"

From the Wall Street Journal:

Baloney I get tired of: The President and His "2% Oil Reserves Myth"

Institute for Energy Research: "Exposing the 2 percent oil reserves myth":

According to President Obama, the United States contains only 2 percent of the planet’s proven oil reserves, Of course, he’s right — to a point. In classic fashion, he’s using a technicality to skirt the facts and keep the myth of energy scarcity alive. The reality is that the U.S. has enough recoverable oil for the next 200 years, despite only having 2 percent of the world’s current proven oil reserves.

Proven oil reserves are not all of our oil resources—not even close. In fact, proved reserves represent a tiny portion of our total oil resources. Proven (or proved) oil reserves are reserves that have already been discovered, typically through actual exploration or drilling, and which can be recovered economically. That estimate does not include oil that we know about, yet are unable to access because of regulatory barriers. For example, the billions of barrels of oil in ANWR are not included in our proved oil reserves. So let’s look at the facts.

Currently, the United States has 1,442 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, but only about 20 billion barrels are considered proven oil reserves.[ii] That is partly because the federal government is denying access to hundreds of millions of acres oil-rich federal lands: the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, the Naval Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, federal waters off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, at least 45 percent of the Gulf of Mexico, the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, and oil shale on federal lands in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, to name a few. In the case of oil shale (an oil composed of kerogen), technology needs to be perfected to make its production viable, but this will not happen until the land is leased. Regrettably, the Department of Interior has stopped a leasing program Congress directed it to undertake.

Remember, some people predict a coming Golden Energy Era". And, remember, the strategic issue is not necessarily the use of oil, but rather the failure to develop infrastructure to insure we can be "energy independent" (within limits - Canada is our energy friend) - see here, where I wrote:

It is the importation of foreign oil that is a strategic issue, not their use. It's the long lines of commerce that bring oil to our shore that are vulnerable.

I guess this makes me a member of the "flat earth club" according to the President. UPDATE: Investors Business Daily sings from the same fact base:

The U.S. has 22.3 billion barrels of proved reserves, a little less than 2% of the entire world's proved reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration. But as the EIA explains, proved reserves "are a small subset of recoverable resources," because they only count oil that companies are currently drilling for in existing fields. When you look at the whole picture, it turns out that there are vast supplies of oil in the U.S., according to various government reports. Among them: At least 86 billion barrels of oil in the Outer Continental Shelf yet to be discovered, according to the government's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. About 24 billion barrels in shale deposits in the lower 48 states, according to EIA. Up to 2 billion barrels of oil in shale deposits in Alaska's North Slope, says the U.S. Geological Survey. Up to 12 billion barrels in ANWR, according to the USGS. As much as 19 billion barrels in the Utah tar sands, according to the Bureau of Land Management. Then, there's the massive Green River Formation in Wyoming, which according to the USGS contains a stunning 1.4 trillion barrels of oil shale — a type of oil released from sedimentary rock after it's heated.