The Future

While everyone spends these days panicking over an increases of one or two drilling rigs, and potential OPEC production cuts. Lets look beyond that, to where production will be years down the road.
Humanity uses close to a hundred million barrels per day. More than thirty billion barrels over the course of a year. That is a whole lot of oil. So where will we get it from in the future? As wells and fields go dry we need to keep bringing new fields online to keep up production. And the petroleum industry spends billions a year in exploration. We have spent decades cataloging fields and building a global backlog of untapped fields. However that appears to be coming to an end, and fast. When the price of oil collapsed, so did exploration budgets. A 60% drop across the industry. And the effects of that are becoming apparent. In 2015 we only discovered 2.7 billion barrels of new reserves, a month’s worth and the lowest amount found in a year since 1947. This year is even worse. Just 700 million barrels by the end of July. Barely a week’s worth, found in seven months’ time. And with the price of oil remaining in the forties, budgets for next year are expected to be just as small.
So what does this mean going forward. There are no new super fields that will save us. Humanity will have to make due with what we have already found. Large aging fields. Small low yield fields. And a few large offshore fields that are technically very difficult to access. None of these options are cheap to produce. We may be in the midst of a glut, but something will give. For years now large projects have been shelved. Big offshore rigs cost a fortune and all new projects have been put on hold. Everyone is trying to get by with small horizontal wells. Those are fine for short term production, but are not a long term answer. They will give out and with the natural declines from the big fields, global production will plummet sharply in a short time. How long this will take will be hard to ascertain. A lot of people think the 2020's.