This is so wrong-headed!

Of COURSE the technology is constantly improving! Of course the big oilmen and governments are going to use state-of-the-art methodology for locating and defining reserves.

But it is all just pandering to our utter addiction and dependence on oil….. and gas and coal! And it is promulgating the ever-increasing rate of consumption of fossil fuels.

That is just plain DUMB!

For all this ‘smart’ technology, the end result can hardly be thought of as smart at all… to say the least!

When I read an article about significant advancements in the use of renewable energy, reductions in overall per-capita energy consumption and methods of halting the expansion of the use of non-renewable energy, all of which would lead to a real REDUCTION in use of fossil fuels, then I might start to be a little bit impressed!

What is just plain dumb, is the preferred use of fully imported petroleum products, that due to the number of refining processes, produces a total 4 times more carbon than locally available, almost ready to use as is, indigenous supplies.
FOUR TIMES AS MUCH!
I'm glad this new technology is available, given we could use it to identify possible massive hydrocarbon reserves to our immediate north, in a way the dumber than dumb green movement can't interfere with!
They don't even need to know it is happening!
Meaning, they are not likely to hold a series of mindless protest marches, stall the traffic, and in so doing, quite literally adds millions of tons of carbon to the atmosphere!
Currently we import 90%+ of all our oil requirements, at a cost to our economy of around 23 billion per!
Money we could use to develop alternatives, like the mass production of carbon absorbing algae, which produce virtually ready to use diesel, or jet fuel, with little or no refining! All that is required is sun drying and simple crushing, with the waste possibly available as cattle fodder, or failing that, the feed source of an endlessly sustainable ethanol industry!
Or methane production utilizing endlessly available human waste; and then using locally invented technology, to turn that methane into endlessly available, endlessly reliable, extremely low cost, virtually carbon free, local energy!
In the interim it would make more sense to identify and use a much lower carbon producing source of low carbon low cost energy; particularly patently, thanks to weak gormless governments, we will have to rely on imported oil for some decades; even were we to start down the road to endlessly sustainable alternatives tomorrow.
Europe needs to find other sources of portable energy, apart from Russian supplies, ditto the Ukraine.
And we need to completely divorce ourselves from extremely dirty, sulfur laden middle east supplies. We need at least a three month reserve, not the three weeks our current supply paradigms give us!
Rhrosty

Hold on Rhrosty. I’m with you all the way on the need to develop alternative energy sources, get away from our reliance on imported oil, and hit our ‘weak gormless’ government over the head for their woeful lack of action, but…

You are lambasting the green movement – the people who are like-minded with you and me!

I’m sorry, but I don’t understand that.

Sure, the ‘greenies’ can be a bit off-track, but basically they are a whole better than the apathetic or business-as-usual-supporting majority.

The new technologies for finding and proving up reserves could be a very good or a very bad thing.

Good if they are utilised as part of a plan to take us away from our dependence on overseas oil and as an interim step towards a genuine sustainability paradigm.

Or bad if they are to be used to simply promulgate and increase our dependence on oil.

I think it is pretty clear that at this point in time, the latter applies.

What is the purpose of this article?

It appears as a rather unconvincing piece suggesting "move along people, nothing to see here, technology will save the day."

It is not as if high technology applications to find oil have not becoming increasingly common - indeed I would suggest that the oil industry has been at the cutting edge of technology since its beginning.

This being the case we should be increasingly concerned about our future oil supply because in spite of all this technology the size and number of giant and super giant oil fields being discovered has been declining for decades.

Advanced technology may enable us to find oil that may not have been otherwise found. But this oil will no doubt be in increasingly difficult locations (or we would have already found it), be more expensive to produce or not even viable to produce.

In short technology is no panacea for peak oil.

No, it all part of the oil industry wishful thinking.
Despite all that advances that have been made in recent years the oil
majors are still having decreased revenue flow and falling profits.
Their profit levels are such that are selling assets to pay dividends.

The tight oil companies are suffering the Red Queen syndrome, ie they
have to increase the rate at which they drill and complete wells in
order to keep production constant. As they move away from the best
locations the daily production per well falls, so they have to complete faster & faster.
Their net production is falling and the EREOI is falling. A point is
only a few years away that production is pointless.