Iraq Lifts Oil Reserves Estimate to 143 Billion Barrels, Overtakes Iran

[sabra]

Source: Bloomberg

Iraq raised its estimate of national crude oil reserves to 143.1 billion barrels, Oil Minister Hussain Al-Shahristani said today, overtaking Iran as home to the world’s fourth-largest petroleum deposits.

The 24 percent increase in estimated reserves lifts Iraq past neighboring Iran, which has 137.6 billion barrels, while leaving it behind Saudi Arabia, Canada and Venezuela. Iraq last estimated its oil reserves at 115 billion barrels, in 2001.

“This is great news for the Iraqi people, and we will relay it to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting countries,” Shahristani said at a news conference at the oil ministry in Baghdad. “The new figure for the reserves is not final. Iraq will carry out studies and reveal new numbers every year. We expect more increases.”

Iraq’s oil reserves previously ranked fifth in size, according to BP Plc’s Statistical Review of World Energy, which compiles official government figures. Canada’s reserves include vast deposits of oil sands, while Venezuela raised its estimates by around 70 percent in 2008, according to BP.

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-04/iraq-lifts-oil-reserves-estimate-overtakes-iran-update1-.html

[GreenTea]

1. This is one big reason Bush illegally invade Iraq.....Hussein threw

out the greedy stealing AMERICAN OIL CORPORATIONS from Iraq - The US attacks Iraq based complete on lies and killed Hussein - NOW all the American oil companies are back in Iraq reaping in huge profits from those huge Iraqi oil fields....Not to mention over 200 American corporations sucking up trillions of our tax dollars in Bush and the republicans war for corporate profit...9/11 gave Bush everything he wanted to lie and attack Iraq while the complicit media went along for the ride and reciting every lie as truth.

[saigon68]

5. And Colon Bowel the War Criminal Cover-up artist

Greased the skids with his lies and distortions

[sofa king]

2. This is how five billion people are going to die.

The sad fact of the matter is that nations have been inflating their oil reserves for decades. The more reserves they claim to have, the more and better monetary loans those nations are offered. There is every incentive to lie, and claims to reserves are difficult or impossible to verify.

But sooner or later the world economy will come to rely more and more upon the bullshit promises of extractable reserves which don't actually exist. Oil producing nations will attempt to keep up the lie as long as possible, to protect their lines of credit. And then one day, the wells simply won't be able to meet demand. Production will drop suddenly and precipitously, and five out of six people on earth who exist solely because of an international oil distribution network will have ninety days to live before the four horsemen come to their neighborhood.

[Nihil]

4. And yet some people just don't see it.

Practically no-one has called the Saudis on their lies about overly-inflated
"reserves" so it only makes sense (albeit short-term and purely financial "sense")
for the other countries to do the same thing: lie about reserves and capitalise
on the increased bargaining power that such lies allow.

:shrug:

> And then one day, the wells simply won't be able to meet demand.

As you say, the political & economical pressure on them to produce to their
(stupidly-inflated) "official levels" will just trash the fields even quicker
and, consequently, steepen the inevitable production tail-off.

[JDPriestly]

3. So, Iran thinks it's so smart. That'll show 'em.

I can guess I have more oil than they can guess they have. Nanee, Nanee, Nanee.

Seriously, oil reserve estimates are estimates. It's fine to make estimates, but they are only as useful as the reality on which they are based. And the big question is not how much oil is estimated to be where but how much it will cost to bring it up, refine and market it. As I understand it, the price of extracting the oil from the sands in Canada is very, very high. At what point does energy from sources other than oil begin to make better economic sense. It's going to happen. Rather than sit back and trust the estimates made by the oil industry, we need to work toward lowering the costs of alternative energy.

I just don't trust all this optimism. Grouchy me.

[bherrera]

6. What optimism?

If you lack the technical data to counter the Iraqi claim, then you can't make a judgement if it's optimistic or not. The article was about Iraq, not Iran.

[JDPriestly]

8. I know it's about Iraq. I was being tongue in cheek.

We are constantly getting these reports of new oil reserve estimates. What are they based on? That is the question. I worked for an oil company way back when and read reports about oil reserves -- due to run out some time between maybe now and maybe 2020 -- according to the estimates at that time.

It is true that new oil reserves have been discovered and that new technology permits the exploitation of reserves that were formerly thought to be unexploitable. But it is also true that demand for oil has increased as third world economies have been industrialized and new uses for oil have been developed.

There are lots of political reasons for overestimating oil reserves right now. I see some of these new estimates as real revisions based on scientific data but suspect that some of them are just bluffs -- for which we could all pay dearly.

[Javaman]

7. 143.1 Billion huh?

The world currently uses about 90 million barrels a day.

That's 32,850,000,000 barrels a year.

Or 4.35 years of oil.

And, no where in the article does it state the quality and type of oil. Sweet or sour?

And given the years of colossally substandard maintenance on those wells, nothing says that all that oil is 1) Recoverable 2) actually usable.

I'm still hunting for an article that was published in 2004 stating that the large Iraqi oil fields had been fouled for years by poor maintenance. The article stated that the US corps would be lucky if they were able to recover and use 15-20% of the oil still in the ground.

Granted not all the worlds oil will be pulled from these wells, but the days of massive oil finds are over. These wells are just more pissing in a bucket with a hole in hopes to fill it.

Plus, oil nations never ever over estimate the size of an oil field...never ever. :eyes:

Driving toward a cliff at high speed is never a good way to prepare to slow down.