Oil Supply, Demand and Price

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Business Week has numbers of oil supply, demand and price which if accurate would indicate a continuation of relatively moderate oil prices through 2010.

Beyond 2010, this site has noted a large supply of $35-65 oil and oil substitutes.

1. Petrobanks THAI/Capri and other oilsand and heavy oil processes could make over a trillion barrels of oil affordable at $20,000 per producing barrel. The oil industry spending of over $200 billion/year on exploration and development would be able to shift over to this process and access known oilsand and heavy oil supplies. The per barrel price using all of the exploration and development budget would add ten million barrels per year added to offset declining oil fields. No exploration risk would be needed because we know where the oilsands are, then it is just develop them as cheap and fast as possible.

2A. Multi-stage horizontal fracturing can be used to access oil in the Bakken Formation and older wells. Old wells in the USA have 360 billion barrels left in them, which have not been affordable to access. Multi-stage horizontal fracturing lowers the costs by 2-3 times.

2B. Multi-stage horizontal fracturing on a large scale would need a lot of material for injectant and a large scale carbon capture storage appears to be affordable according to MIT.

3. Coal gasification and liquification is coming on stream and could be million barrel per day additions and growing from 2016+.

4. Third and fourth generation biofuel processes appear also to be on track to significant scale and affordability.

Nuclear power could provide power for coal liquification and oilsand recovery and advanced biofuel processes.