After years of shunning North America and Europe in favor of exotic locales that promised oil in far greater quantities at a much lower cost, the industry's largest players have come crawling back. The reason? Those big projects have been difficult to pull off and haven't made up for declining production in more mature regions like the U.S. Last year the five largest U.S. and British oil companiesExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA), BP (BP), Chevron (CVX), and ConocoPhillips (COP), which together account for 11% of worldwide outputsaw their oil production slide 3%, to 10 million barrels per day. Those shrinking supplies are one reason that oil now tops $125 a barrel.
Shale
The Majors Look West, Again
Are the International Oil Companies Running Out of Oil?
Is the world running out of oil? The answer is: No, not for a long, long time. So far, we have produced only about 1 trillion of the worlds approximately 5 trillion barrels of recoverable oil, both conventional and nonconventional.
But getting at the other 8 to 10 trillion barrels of oil locked within planet Earth is going to be very, very difficult, if not impossible. Even for the 4 trillion barrels of remaining recoverable oil, we face production barriers, environmental concerns, infrastructure constraints and geopolitical complications that are truly mind-boggling.