Talk:Oil reserves

Modern sources for table: world reserves by country

As was pointed out above 3 years ago, the numbers given in this article are obsolete. Even worse, many or most sources of data don't use the SPE definition distinguishing "reserves" from "resources". (The academic source quoted and cited below is an exception.) Aside from the lede, reverted by User:Plazak to conform to SPE (and then clarified by me), most of the article and its tables presently present SPE "resources", but calls them "reserves". (This is exactly the sort of issue that WP should get right.)

The data appearing in this table can be updated using this table, which contains those of both Rystad Energy from 2016, which is independent of any oil company or government, and those of BP from 2015. It would be good to include several of these columns for comparison, as they do. Furthermore, the bottom note below their table clarifies that their numbers represent technical reserves, not economic reserves: "including non-commercial volumes". These data were reported by citable news sources here and here.

A 2015 source distinguishing technical resources from economic reserves is this academic article in a prestigious peer-refereed journal. They provide some numbers for regions, and some individual countries, using these definitions:

In this work ‘resources’ are taken to be the remaining ultimately recoverable resources (RURR)—the quantity of oil, gas or coal remaining that is recoverable over all time with both current and future technology, irrespective of current economic conditions. ‘Reserves’ are a subset of resources that are defined to be recoverable under current economic conditions and have a specific probability of being produced. Our best estimates of the reserves and resources are presented in Fig. 1 and, at the regional level, in Extended Data Table 1.

Layzeeboi (talk) 09:07, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

References

Oil reserves

Have most of the people that have said that that we will barely have any oil in the last 50 years of this century largely been discredited? Akuma809 (talk) 23:04, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Wrong reserves-to-production ratio again (2018)

I have changed the numbers to correct ones. There must be some joker.

Update

This article needs to be updated and cleaned up to bring it in to line with with revised reserves reporting guidelines from SEC and the updated PRMS of 2018. I will be progressing this over the next few weeks with a panel of industry and academic experts. In general, it will be a simplification and more inline with Wikipedia principles, without the need to present global reserves estimates, which don't conform to reserves accounting standards and are constantly changing. If you would like to peer review, please contact me.Guy WF Loftus (talk) 15:18, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

One calendar month later and the revision is progressing steadily, involving engagement with SPE amongst others. Please pitch in if you would like to. At the moment, I am planning to move ‘’’Oil reserves’’’ to ‘’’Hydrocarbon Resource and Reserves Quantification’’’, with redirects from Oil Reserves, Gas reserves, Hydrocarbon reserves, Reserves accounting, Oil Resources, Gas resources, Hydrocarbon resources, Petroleum reserves, Petroleum resources, possibly integrating Proven reserves. Guy WF Loftus (talk) 05:34, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

An incipient revised article has now been moved to draft space for more contributions Draft:Hydrocarbon Reserves and Resource quantification. The plan is to merge the two articles if the incipient replacement is acceptable to a wider readership.Guy WF Loftus (talk) 07:29, 18 June 2022 (UTC)

The revised article is now ready for merge and by consensus, is now called Oil & gas reserves and resource quantification. Valuable contributions have been made over a three month period by Messrs, Drs and Profs R. Barrett, M. Bond, S. Bloemendaal, “Chidgk1”, P. Burgess, J. Filbrandt, G. Loftus, A. Mellin, J. Redfearn and the Oil and Gas Reserves Committee of the Society of Petroleum Engineers

Merge Discussion

The new article Oil & gas reserves and resource quantification is now available in mainspace, with the old article Oil reserves tagged for merge.Guy WF Loftus (talk) 14:38, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

I understand you want it deleted rather than merged? As you can see I started a deletion discussion. But I am not a subject expert so I will leave you to click the link at the top of the article and explain why it should be deleted Chidgk1 (talk) 14:43, 6 November 2022 (UTC)