Peak Oil Passnotes: BP and Shell Show Failures of Corporate Model

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If it were possible to have never ending economic growth something very difficult would have to happen. Basically we would need a never ending supply of resources and a never ending supply of capacity in which to expand.

These kind of economic neo-classical laws simply do not work and two of the companies who are finding out first are the oil companies Shell and BP .

Shell has been stumbling around the world trying to find extra production since the turn of the century, and well before that too. It has indeed managed to find some amazing new deposits of oil and gas, most notably the Sakhalin projects in Russia, notably Sakhalin2.

However the most interesting thing about Sakhalin 2 is the amazing engineering feats required to extract the gas and oil from underneath the somewhat chilly terrain. It is a testament to the workers at Shell that they have managed to extract oil and gas from a region so amazingly cold.

Of course the reason Shell needs to go to a region so remote, both physically and politically, is because it cannot find large deposits elsewhere. Quarter for quarter, Shell has consistently tried and failed to increase its production by any significant amount. Having produced as much as 3.96 million barrels per day in 2002, it produced 3.5 million barrels per day last year and looks set to produce something like that in 2006.

http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=25404