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What Peak Oil?

2:46 PM, Apr 24, 2008 • By MICHAEL GOLDFARB
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Bloomberg reports several potentially massive oil finds off the coast of Brazil:

Brazil's state-controlled Petroleo Brasileiro SA in November said the offshore Tupi field may hold 8 billion barrels of recoverable crude. Among discoveries in the past 30 years, only the 15-billion-barrel Kashagan field in Kazakhstan is larger.

Haroldo Lima, director of the country's oil agency, last week said another subsea field, Carioca, may have 33 billion barrels of oil. That would be the third biggest field in history, behind only the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia and Burgan in Kuwait....

Flannery told clients during an April 16 conference call that 600 million barrels is a ``reasonable'' estimate and suggested Lima may have been referring to the entire geologic formation to which Carioca belongs.

This on top of a recent report by the USGS of at least 4 billion barrels of recoverable deposits in the Bakken formation straddling the North Dakota-Canada border. There may be as much as 15 billion barrels in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, more than 10 billion barrels in ANWR, and there could be hundreds of billions of barrels in the Arctic.

The Bloomberg story says the Brazilian fields "could help end the Western Hemisphere's reliance on Middle East crude." That can't happen soon enough, and it won't, but this type of news does make one more skeptical of claims that we're running out of oil.

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