As a continuation to last week’s article titled “Oil industry’s R&D deactivates ‘peak'”, and as reported by the 2013 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, the world has increased its global oil reserves by 15 billion barrels in 2012 reaching a total of 1,669 billion barrels by end of 2012. These additional global reserves amounted to 647 billion bbls between 2002 and 2012, the highest in the last few decade, was achieved despite the exponential cumulative global consumption of more than 300 billion bbls during the same period. It is worth mentioning here that 50% of today’s global reserves are located in the Middle East region and more than 72% with OPEC countries. The 26% over the 2002 figure can be directly correlated to the exponential Research & Development (R&D) investment that has been spent by the oil industry in the last decade. Although the literature lacks specific quantitative […]