Future oil supplies to come from lower quality, energy intensive sources

Sun 18 February 2007 View all news

A report from Wood Mackenzie, a leading oil and energy consultancy, concludes that there are 3,600bn barrels of oil and gas available in 'unconventional sources' such as oil sands and tars but that extracting these resources will itself take a lot of energy.

Wood Mackenzie's study concludes that within 15 years all of the world's extra oil supply is likely to come from hard-to-develop sources of energy such as Canada's oil sands and Venezuela's Orinoco tar belt ; sources which will be more expensive and environmentally damaging to extract. Currently only about 15 per cent of the global oil production is of heavy and extra-heavy oil.

According to an article about the WoodMac study in the Financial Times, the report makes clear that the shift to unconventional oil and gas sources could come sooner than had been expected, even though some major conventional oil fields will still be increasing their production in 2020. Those increases are not forecast to be enough to offset the decline elsewhere.

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