INNOVATION & TECHNOLOGY

Access to Mineral Resources

Gaining access to energy resources is the main challenge western oil companies must face: technology is the critical factor to gain access, especially with regard to "difficult" oil and gas.
Remaining recoverable conventional hydrocarbon resources – oil and natural gas – are abundant and estimated to account for 2,300 – 2,900 billions of barrels of oil and 315,000 billions of cubic meters of natural gas, according to technical assessments. Such volumes are sufficient to guarantee current levels of production of hydrocarbons fuels for the next 95 years.
However, national companies and their governments hold under their direct and mandatory control over 90% of the world's oil and 80% of gas reserves. This narrows down the opportunities for western oil companies.
Meanwhile, most of the "historical" hydrocarbon fields owned by the major producing Countries (but also those fields operated by western companies in the areas where they have access) are characterized by growing "technological" maturity – the origin for their production decline. Technological maturity means the impossibility to extract additional quantities of oil and gas using traditional techniques and methodologies. The issue here, as mentioned earlier, involves the enormous fields of major producing countries – from the Persian Gulf to Russia, from Mexico to Venezuela – discovered 30, 40, or 50 years ago and still operating as well as fields located in OECD areas – as the USA and the North Sea: they show on average production decline rates exceeding 10% per year and a remaining production life of only 10 years for old fields.

The control of world hydrocarbon reserves, yesterday and today

In general, the world's average recovery rate of oil from oil known fields is 35%, which means that 65% of the resources contained inside the same oil fields are doomed to stay trapped underground. These averages, however, can be tricky. In those areas of the world where western companies have full access to exploration and to the development of the oil fields (the United States, Europe), recovery rates are close to 50%. In those areas where access is neither guaranteed nor granted, recovery rates are less than 30%.
The availability of new technologies for hydrocarbon exploration and development along with large scale implementation of the existing ones represents an essential condition to provide the world with the energy supply it needs as well as to give the companies who hold such technologies a competitive lever to increase their chances to gain access to resources not presently available.