Another Saudi Arabia of Oil Discovered Off Coast of China?

To China, the world’s biggest energy consumer, another Saudi Arabia of oil may lie beneath the ocean to its south. Escalating regional tensions mean large-scale drilling may be slipping further into the future. _Bloomberg_via_BrianWang

Brian Wang China Offshore Oil ClaimsYou may wonder how it is possible that such a large quantity of oil could sit there all this time, without having been discovered.

The world has barely begun to be explored for hydrocarbon deposits. The only partial exception to that rule is North America. But even in North America, significant new finds are coming in both under land and under sea. More from Vaclav Smil:

...until the sedimentary basins of the entire world (including deep offshore regions) are explored with an intensity matching that of North America and the U.S. sector of the Gulf of Mexico, I see no persuasive reason to prefer the most conservative estimate of the ultimately recoverable conventional oil offered by Campbell & Company (no more than 1.8 trillion barrels) rather than substantially higher totals favored by other geologists, including those at the U.S. Geological Survey (their latest estimate is just over 3 trillion barrels)._Peak Oil PDF

More about the recent revelations on the China Sea discovery:

Chinese estimates of oil reserves cited by the U.S. energy agency compare with 264.5 billion barrels of proven reserves held by Saudi Arabia at the end of last year, data from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy show.

The region may hold 2 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas. That’s more than five times the 350.8 trillion cubic feet of gas held in North America, according to BP.

The Chinese numbers dwarf a 2010 United States Geological Survey assessment of the entire Southeast Asia region which calculated a mean undiscovered reserves estimate of 21.6 billion barrels of oil and 299 trillion cubic feet of gas, including onshore deposits.

“There are definitely oil and gas deposits in the South China Sea, but there’s no confirmation how much until actual drilling happens,” said Hooman Peimani, Principal Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Energy Institute. _Bloomberg_via_BrianWang

And this is likely to be only the beginning of large new discoveries, as humans range farther and deeper in their quest for valuable energy deposits.

Most of the world's oil & gas remains undiscovered and untapped. If we are wise in the development of new energy sources -- such as advanced nuclear -- those vast and rich deposits will likely never be touched. If only the energy starvationists would get out of the way.

South China Sea may hold 213 billion barrels of oil