The Reserves Discovery and Appreciation Process

The future availability of oil has long been a recurring issue both for the industry and with government policymakers (Williamson, 1963). As long as it remained a relatively unimportant energy source, with its use on a significant scale restricted to a relatively small number of countries (most notably the US), as was the case until after the second World War, a fear of global scarcity was not a real issue. For the few mainly oil using countries before 1939 their concern was related to a perceived scarcity of indigenous supplies.

Post-1945, however, in the context of oil rapidly becoming the most important source of global energy needs with oil eventually supplying over half of the world s total energy use by 1958 a widely held perception of the idea that the world would be unable to continue to run on oil for the rest of the 20th century quickly emerged (Odell, 1964). This view grew in strength in the 1960s as oil use expanded at over 7% per annum and was powerfully set out in an article by no less than the chief geologist of British Petroleum in the very early 1970s (Warman, 1972). Though the fundamental validity of the analysis which produced this result was challenged (Odell, 1973), pessimism on oil s future prospects persisted. It was eventually expressed most emphatically and succinctly in a study, subsequently published with a high profile launch by BP, under the title Oil Crisis Again? (BP,...