IS World Oil Reserves Audit[2]4

An Armchair Audit of World Oil Reserves It is well known that the lack of international standards on reserves estimation methodologies has led to disparities in the oil reserves reported by the more than 90 oil producing countries. For instance, most of the countries with large oil reserves, notably, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela are known to report up to 1five times more reserves to sustain a similar level of production capacity when compared with other major oil producing countries such as Mexico, Norway, Russia, UK and the USA. In the case of the North Sea, Norway reports twice as many proven reserves as the UK although the petroleum geology of the basins is common in size, and the number of fields to both countries. Additionally, because of the importance of oil in their balance of payments and in the economy, many oil-producing developing countries outside OPEC have developed a policy of withholding technical information 2on reserves and production . Although production statistics are temporarily held confidential by some countries, it is generally felt that because oil is such an important commodity in world trade, surveyed production data by reputable international firms is fairly reliable. Usually when the production data is released it compares satisfactorily with the surveyed data. In the case of reserves, however, there is no source for comparison. The objective of this study is to use decline curve analysis of ...