This year’s BP Statistical Review again puts the oil and gas figures into a wider all-forms energy context and chimes nicely with another recent arrival
Introducing this year’s BP Statistical Review of World Energy, group chief executive Bob Dudley notes “how competition and a level playing field foster innovation, ultimately leading to the production of previously inaccessible, new, ‘unconventional’ resources”.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and analyst Daniel Yergin of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates put it very similarly in his very upbeat account of precisely those same industries – in other words energy in all forms – last year.
We quote from his widely acclaimed The Prize: “Fundamental … is the search for knowledge, which advances technology and promotes innovation.” And he goes on to repeat the well-known adage that “Oil is found in the minds of men”.
But not last year it wasn’t, apparently. The most striking single statistic contained without comment within this year’s Statistical Review is that over the last recorded 12 months global proved reserves of oil increased on trend by just over 30 billion (thousand million) barrels; that’s a healthy sounding 1.9 per cent. But an astonishing 28.1 billion of those were found in fast-recovering
Take out those conflict-delayed barrels and there was hardly any increase around the world at all. Meanwhile global consumption rose by 0.7 per cent, a below-average figure due to measures taken in the industrialised countries the IOC’s number crunchers point out.
In natural gas the end result of the new-discoveries story is much the same (though admittedly that’s mainly because of lack of looking, the reasons for which Mr Yergin goes into in much detail).
Take out the sensational advances in shale gas discoveries and production – in the
Total world trade in LNG grew by more than 11.1 per cent last year; international pipeline business by just 2.0 per cent. Meanwhile regional price disparities have grown massively – alarmingly to some without the long-term contract terms that so many of Ras Laffan’s customers adhere to.
Among the key points made specifically about oil in this year’s BP Statistical Review are:
- Global consumption grew by a below-average 0.6mbd in 2011, or 0.7 per cent
- OECD consumption was down 1.2 points to reach the lowest level since 1995
- Elsewhere growth was 2.8 per cent
- Production overall was up 1.1mbd, or 1.3 per cent. Nearly all this increase took place within OPEC, with large particularly increases in the KSA,
To read the rest of this article, make sure you pick up the next edition of Oil Review Middle East, which will be out in mid-August 2012
