Still A Lot More Oil Where That Came From

.....nearly two-thirds of crude still gets left in the ground. So oil companies are raising the ante, investing billions of dollars in cutting-edge technology to increase the amount of crude they can tap.

The potential rewards are huge: Raising the average recovery rate world-wide to 50% from 35% would boost the world's recoverable oil by about 1.2 trillion barrels -- equal to the whole of today's proven reserves, the International Energy Agency says. _WSJ

For more on how the oil companies plan to go back time and again to retrieve yet more oil from old wells, read the whole article above. Since the oil dictatorships of MENA, Russia, Africa, South America, etc. have shut out the large multinational oil companies, the companies have decided to get what they can where they can. Certainly after having your assets nationalised by creeps such as Chavez, Putin, and Morales, oil companies can be forgiven for being shy around the bloody dictators of the world.

Third world oil sheikhs and dictators are unwilling to invest in advanced technologies of oil exploration, drilling, and recovery. They will try to induce western and Chinese companies to re-invest in their dilapidated infrastructure, but how many times will the high tech companies allow themselves to be fooled?

Regardless, sometime within the next 10 to 20 years, alternative supplies of fuels will come online that will start to price most petroleum products out of the fuel markets. All that we are asking of current oil, gas, bitumen, kerogen, and coal fields is that they bridge us over the next 20 years or so.