Running Out of Oil?

That's certainly the drumbeat of the conventional wisdom. Rafael Sandrea begs to disagree. Sandrea is an oil and gas veteran who sold his Venezuelan firm in 2004 and returned to Tulsa, Oklahoma, (for some reason) where he had attended university. Now a consultant, he got the lead story in the May 18 issue of the Oklahoma City-based legal newspaper, The Journal Record (www.journalrecord.com). Even if Sandrea's argument makes few headlines these days, it isn't new. 

There is a whole lot of oil still in the ground, Sandrea says. A new focus on enhanced oil recovery methods "could unlock 70 percent of more of (the) remaining oil" in the ground. "In the U.S., two-thirds of the oil is still in the ground," he told The Journal Record. Enhanced oil recovery techniques account for three percent of present world oil production. In New Mexico, carbon dioxide, the same evil stuff behind global warming, is produced from the 1.2 million acre Bravo Dome Field in Union, Harding and Quay counties and transported to the Permian Basin in southeast New Mexico and Texas for enhanced oil recovery.

Sandrea has released a study of world oil resources through the Oil & Gas Journal Research Center, a subsidiary of PennEnergy of Tulsa.