Like who wants to go to one of the old central Asia Soviet Republics to dig up oil. That is the story with a lot of the reserves--people are hung up on other issues which makes it hard to get at the oil.
Exploration is the same way--there are large parts of the planet where no one has looked for oil. There may be 10 more Saudi Arabia's out there undiscovered. If you count oil sand, which is starting to come on-line, Canada would be #2 in oil reserves.
Yes, but there is a price point where it is break-even. Some say that price point is $45 a barrel. If oil is going to stay above that number, look for shale to become a high priority item. Below that, it simply didn't make economic sense to go after it.
Agreed--they need a stable government before anything can come together over there.
The big thing we need is R&D. We need research work to go into new products, and we need pilot projects to test them. That isn't going to happen when oil can be pumped and transported half way around the world, then sold for less than the cost of bottled water. As a for example, the RAND group states that potential efficiency gains in solar energy could replace oil if it stays above $60 a barrel. And the University of Wisconsin has a paper coming out at a conference where they discuss a new corn-based diesel power that has twice the energy of existing bio-diesels.
-john-
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