New Report: Innovation in Oil and Natural Gas Production Assures Future Supplies

From the Manhattan Institute:

In 2012, U.S. oil production rose by 790,000 barrels per day, the biggest annual increase since U.S. oil production began in 1859. In 2013, the Energy Information Administration expects production to rise yet again, by 815,000 barrels per day, which would set another record. Domestic natural gas production is also at record levels. 

What has allowed such dramatic production increases? Innovation in the drilling sector. The convergence of a myriad of technologies—ranging from better drill bits and seismic data to robotic rigs and high-performance pumps—is allowing the oil and gas sector to produce staggering quantities of energy from locations that were once thought to be inaccessible or bereft of hydrocarbons. 

The dominance of oil and gas in our fuel mix will continue. The massive scale of the global drilling sector, combined with its technological prowess, gives us every reason to believe that we will have cheap, abundant, reliable supplies of oil and gas for many years to come. 

The key findings of this paper include:

• Between 1949 and 2010, thanks to improved technology, oil and gas drillers reduced the number of dry holes drilled from 34 percent to 11 percent. 

• Global spending on oil and gas exploration dwarfs what is spent on "clean" energy. In 2012 alone, drilling expenditures were about $1.2 trillion, nearly 4.5 times the amount spent on alternative energy projects. 

• Despite more than a century of claims that the world is running out of oil and gas, estimates of available resources continue rising because of innovation. In 2009, the International Energy Agency more than doubled its prior-year estimate of global gas resources, to some 30,000 trillion cubic feet—enough gas to last for nearly three centuries at current rates of consumption. 

• In 1980, the world had about 683 billion barrels of proved reserves. Between 1980 and 2011, residents of the planet consumed about 800 billion barrels of oil. Yet in 2011, global proved oil reserves stood at 1.6 trillion barrels, an increase of 130 percent over the level recorded in 1980. 

• The dramatic increase in oil and gas resources is the result of a century of improvements to older technologies such as drill rigs and drill bits, along with better seismic tools, advances in materials science, better robots, more capable submarines, and, of course, cheaper computing power.

About the Author 

ROBERT BRYCE is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute's Center for Energy Policy and the Environment. He has been writing about energy for two decades and his articles have appeared in numerous publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to The New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly to the Washington Post. Bryce's first book, Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron, was named one of the best nonfiction books of 2002 by Publishers Weekly. In 2008, he publishedGusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of "Energy Independence". A review of Gusher of Lies in The New York Times called Bryce "something of a visionary and perhaps even a revolutionary." His fourth book, Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, was published in April 2010 by PublicAffairs. The Wall Street Journal called Power Hungry "precisely the kind of journalism we need to hold truth to power." The Washington Times said Bryce's "magnificently unfashionable, superlatively researched new book dares to fly in the face of all current conventional wisdom and cant." Bryce appears regularly on major media outlets including CNN, FOX News, PBS, NPR, and the BBC. He received his B.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1986.

Read the report here.  Download it as a pdf here.

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