News – ASPO.be

Peak oil is back. White paper published in the Belgian Newspaper L’Echo, 02 July 2020.

3 July 2020 PB 0

Oil is non-renewable over the human timescale. Its extraction rate is initially zero, then it increases (the phase that we have known for the past 150 years), reaches a maximum called “peak oil”, then declines due to natural and human constraints. That is why oil will potentially be extracted for another 150 years, but less each year, and at increasing costs: first there was conventional oil, then oil sands and shale oil, and in the future, maybe oil from shale rocks. […]

Covid-19 report, 10th edition. Global outbreak overview and its impact on the energy sector.

16 May 2020 PB 0

Since the coronavirus outbreak, Rystad energy publishes a report about the impact of the virus on the energy sector, especially on oil. This report is regularly updated and can be found on their website, on their dedicated covid-19 page. Those information are also available in their press releases. Here, you can download the 10th edition of this report in pdf, […]

World conventional oil and gas discoveries at 12 billion barrels of oil equivalent in 2019.

20 January 2020 PB 0

The world’s oil and gas explorers discovered 12.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe) in 2019, the highest volume since 2015, according to estimates from Rystad Energy. The replacement ratio was at about 19%. It is improving with respect to 2018 (15%), but it is still far from the 50% level of 2012, and from 100% in 2006, the last […]

Shale Reality Check 2019.

13 November 2019 PB 0

Shale gas and tight oil have provided a new lease on life for U.S. oil and gas production. But how sustainable is shale production in the long term given optimistic forecasts of robust production through 2050 and beyond? […]

Reserve replacement ratio dips to the lowest in decades.

10 October 2019 PB 0

Oil and gas companies have discovered 7.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe) of conventional oil and gas year-to-date, according to Rystad Energy’s latest global discoveries report. The so-called resource replacement ratio for conventional resources now stands around 16%, meaning that only one barrel out of every six consumed is being replaced by new sources. See press release in pdf. […]

A new website for ASPO.be

18 January 2019 PB 0

On January 15, 2019, ASPO.be launched its new website. With french and english sections. Many publications about peak oil are written in English, while many readers of ASPO.be are francophone. To avoid to our visitors the struggle to search among documents written in a langage that is not familiar to them, we divided the website into French and English sections. […]

Book: Oil, Power, and War. A dark history.

16 January 2019 PB 0

By Matthieu Auzanneau. Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing: In this sweeping, unabashed history of oil, Matthieu Auzanneau takes a fresh, thought-provoking look at the way oil interests have commandeered politics and economies, changed cultures, disrupted power balances across the globe, and spawned wars. He upends commonly held assumptions about key political and financial events of the past 150 years, and he […]

Rystad Energy expects global conventional discoveries to be 9.4 billion barrels of oil equivalent in 2018.

11 January 2019 PB 1

Guyana, Russia and the United States top the list with major discoveries. Rystad Energy expects 9.4 billion boe in conventional oil and gas for the year 2018, which constitute a replacement ratio of 15%. This ratio is low but is an improvement with respect to the 11% obtained in 2017. Read original document Pdf of the press release.

Shale Technology: Moore’s law or Turgot’s? SailingStone capital partners, january 2018

2 July 2018 PB 0

In the last decade, we have witnessed seismic changes in the oil and gas industry, particularly regarding the economics of North American unconventional production. A significant portion of these advances have been attributed to technology, which many observers expect to be a continued source of deflation into the future. In this paper, we attempt to disaggregate structural improvements in well […]

All-time low for discovered resources in 2017: Around 7 billion barrels of oil equivalent was discovered.

16 February 2018 PB 1

Rystad Energy concluded this week that 2017 was yet another record low year for discovered conventional volumes globally. Less than seven billion barrels of oil equivalent has been discovered YTD. “We haven’t seen anything like this since the 1940s,” says Sonia Mladá Passos, Senior Analyst at Rystad Energy. “The discovered volumes averaged at ~550 million barrels of oil equivalent per […]