The total reserves of all new oil and gas fields discovered in 2017 amounted to the lowest index in the history of the calculation – 6.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent, the report of the Norwegian company Rystad Energy said.
About 1 billion barrels of this figure will never be extracted, since its extraction is unprofitable, experts say.
“Nothing of the sort has been observed since the 1940s,” said senior analyst of Rystad, Sonia Mlada Passos. “We need to realize that such a low number of discovered fields pose a major threat to the supply of oil in a decade-long perspective.”
The average amount of reserves discovered in 2017 is about 100 million barrels of oil against the 150 million barrels discovered in 2012.
The biggest fear of experts is the fact that new fields have filled depleted resources by only 11%. In 2012, the figure was more than 50%. It was possible to completely compensate for depleted deposits in 2006.
