Increasing Oil Reserves and Peak Oil As I explain in the book, reserves have a special meaning refer to those geologic accumulations that can be economically extracted with the current technology. With the development of technology and/or changes in the price of oil, geologic accumulations that were once only part of the larger resource base may get transferred to the reserves. Focusing only on the reservesis apt to give a wrong impression about the total availability of oil. The chart below shows the historic data from the 2014 edition of the BP Statistical Review of Global Energy (BP2014) for the World Proved Reserves and the Reserves to Production (R/P) ratio. This ratio has often been mistakenly interpreted as the years to exhaustion. Likewise, current price of oil largely reflects the immediate surplus or shortage of supplies, and reflects more on the conditions above ground (in the supply […]