Here’s an even broader picture......
In 1944, U.S. proven oil reserves were 20 billion barrels — about the same as they are today. Yet, between 1945 and 2010, the United States produced 167 billion barrels of oil. In other words, the United States produced over 8 times more oil than the amount of proven oil reserves it had in 1944. How can that be? The answer is that proven oil reserves are not stagnant because people keep looking for oil. Proven oil reserves keep changing, are officially recorded every year, tallied country by country, and published in the Oil and Gas Journal, among other publications. And due to U.S. entrepreneurship and ingenuity, more reserves are found and proven each year.
What happens is one or more of the following: 1) technology is found that converts hard-to-produce resources into proven reserves, 2) oil prices increase to allow more expensive types of oil to be produced, and/or 3) companies are able to purchase additional leases and explore for new basins of oil. An example of the first case where technology enables oil resources to become proven reserves is hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling used to produce shale oil resources, most notably in North Dakota. North Dakota now ranks third among the states in oil production.[iii] Its proven reserves have increased 25-fold in 13 years, and are likely to grow much larger.
“What happens is one or more of the following: 1) technology is found that converts hard-to-produce resources into proven reserves, 2) oil prices increase to allow more expensive types of oil to be produced, and/or 3) companies are able to purchase additional leases and explore for new basins of oil. An example of the first case where technology enables oil resources to become proven reserves is hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling used to produce shale oil resources, most notably in North Dakota. North Dakota now ranks third among the states in oil production.[iii] Its proven reserves have increased 25-fold in 13 years, and are likely to grow much larger.”
Or as in our case ya drill a little deeper then the Wolfberry and we find the Canyon Sands. We’ve been drilling Wolfberry wells here for many years, then we decided to go down to 9000 ft and see whats there, we hit the Canyon Sands at about 8500 ft and these wells are coming in at close to 400 bpd and holding a around 60 bpd after a year. This was on our old Wolfcamp stuff that was pretty much played out in this area. Seismic did not show this, so I guess what I’m trying to say is, you don’t really know what you have until ya start puching holes.
Bulls eye! Your point is exactly how to refute the lies told by Obambi and someone should start running ads explaining to the public that reserves are not static.
The point needs to be made that we have no idea what percentage of the worlds oil reserves we actually have because the federal government has excluded most offshore areas of the US from exploration. I know from experience that there are some elephants still out there to be found.