Oil & Gas Today

Oil

Identified conventional crude oil reserves are, as expected, dominated by the Middle East.
Much of this is based on the word of the host countries, and is subject to political manipulation. There is no solid data.
Very few reserves remain in the key consumers (4% in the US, 1% in Europe).
The Top 5 producers of crude oil in 2007, including NGL, were:

Russia (487Mt, 12.4%),

Saudi Arabia (483Mt, 12.3%),

US (310Mt, 7.9%),

Iran (218Mt, 5.5%),

and China (188 Mt, 4.8%).

Of the Top 5 producers of 2007 the US and China consumed more than they produced, also making the list of the top 5 importers (Japan, Korea, and India made the rest of the consuming top 5).
The US imported 587Mt in 2007.
The top 5 exporters in 2007 were:

Saudi Arabia (358Mt),

Russia (248Mt),

Iran (130Mt),

Nigeria (119Mt),

Norway (109Mt).

Gas

Gas production grew from 1,227bcm in 1973 to 3,031 bcm in 2007.
OECD control of this resource has dropped from 71.3% in 1973 to 37.4% in 2007.
The big growth gas areas have been pretty much everywhere outside of the OECD:

USSR (19.7% – 27.7%),

Africa (0.8% – 6.8%),

Latin America (2% – 4.8%),

Asia (1% – 9.3%)

Middle East (2.1%-11.3%).

The Importance of Big Fields

As of the year 2000, over 4,000 named oilfields with a population of almost one million individual wells created a 68 million bopd supply (out of a total 76 million bopd daily demand inclusive of NGL)
The average field produced less than 20,000 barrels per day.
World crude oil production is well described by a parabolic fractal distribution, with small fields creating relatively minor production add, and just a few fields (<100) contributing more than 50%. That’s a long tail…
The top 100 of the world’s oilfields ranked by production, just 3% of the total, contain 65% of estimated proved reserves and accounted for 51.6% of the world’s production in 2006.
The top 20 of the world’s oilfields by production contained 40% of estimated proved reserves and accounted for 27.7% of the world’s production in 2006.
Just 10 oilfields account for 29.9% of the worlds estimated proven reserves and accounted for 20.4% of the world’s production in 2006.
The four largest oilfields account for 12% of the world’s supply, more than the aggregate of all of the oil produced in every other continent outside the Middle East.
Even in North America, which has over 600,000 individual oil wells, 17 giant fields account for 32% of North America’s daily supply.
The average age of the 14 largest fields is 43.5 years (Simmons and Co), these fields still produce > 500,000 barrels a day.
The average age of the 19 largest oil fields is almost 70 years (Simmons and Co).
The age distribution of the world’s giant oilfields also indicates that older fields still produce far higher volumes of oil than the newer giant oilfields.
Thirty years ago, the world’s top ten oilfields produced over 10 mbopd (of 50mopd world total). Their average production was just over 1 million barrels a day each.
In 2001 the world’s top ten oilfields produced much more than this.
However, many of these fields are old and no longer have any production growth capacity – many are actually in decline (for example, Cantarell, the last supergiant field with a production potential > 1 million barrels a day was discovered in 1976).
Only a handfull of new oil fields that initiated production in 2006-2009 are estimated to produce > 100,000 bopd.