Just how much oil does the Middle East really have, and does it matter?

[4dsc]

http://www.peakoil.net/CC4April2005OilGas.html

amazing that ALL OPEC countries inflated their known reserves. But what's really surprising is how despite years of oil production, these numbers never come down in the press.. Note that every times you see the Saudi's oil reserves printed in the press, it will say the reserves are still at 267(give or take a few billion)billion barrels of reserve. They don't change.. So who lying and why??

Looking at earlier issues of Oil & Gas Journal, we find that Kuwait reported reserves of 65 billion bbl in 1980. It had produced 20.28 billion bbl to that point in time, meaning that a total of about 85 billion bbl had been found. Much of it lay in the well-known Burgan field, discovered in 1938, but there were also a number of other fields of giant size.

By 1984, Kuwait's cumulative oil production had risen to 21.53 billion bbl, which explains why reported reserves had fallen to 64 billion bbl, given there had been no significant discoveries in the meantime.

However in 1985, Kuwait announced a massive increase of reserves—to 90 billion bbl—which was clearly implausible in relation to the long sequence of earlier reports, but it was close to the total discovered, assuming a slightly more generous recovery factor.

It has been suggested that one of the reasons for this sudden increase was a new OPEC procedure whereby production quotas were partly based on reported reserves.

Accordingly, in 1988, Abu Dhabi came in with precisely the same 92 billion bbl in reserves as reported by Kuwait, up from the 31 billion bbl reported in the preceding year; Iran went one better reporting 93 billion bbl, up from 49 billion bbl; while Iraq, not to be outdone, came in with a rounded 100 billion bbl, up from 47 billion bbl.

But Saudi Arabia faced a difficulty not being able to match Kuwait since it was already reporting more. It pondered its decision for 2 more years before announcing a massive increase from 170 billion bbl to 258 billion bbl, presumably having decided to follow the precedent of Kuwait in reporting total discovered (also described as "original reserves"), and not remaining reserves.