Within the next few years, Iraq is positioned to rival Saudi Arabia by bringing its oil production to 11 million barrels a day, once again proving that "peak-oil" hysteria is just another hoax, Jerome Corsi's Red Alert reports.
Scientists for the U.S. Geological Survey have also suggested Venezuela's oil reserves may double the reserves in Saudi Arabia.
"Both announcements cast further doubt on the peak-oil theory, the idea that world consumption is exhausting the earth's available supply of oil," Corsi wrote.
Iraq
Occidental Petroleum along with two international partners – one from Italy and the other from Korea – signed a technical agreement last week to develop the massive 4 billion-barrel Zubair oil field in Iraq, near Basra.
With an anticipated investment of $20 billion over the next 20 years, Occidental and its partners plan to ramp up the Zubair field's production to 1.2 million barrels a day within six years, up from the current production of about 200,000 barrels a day.
The Zubair oil field is only one of several giant oil fields in Iraq that Iraq is planning to develop in the next few years.
The Los Angeles Times reported that a consortium involving Russia's OAO Lukoil and Norway's Statoil has been signed to develop the huge West Qurna Phase 2 oil field that holds an estimated 12.9 billion barrels of oil.
The Iraqi government is also on the verge of signing yet a third contract, this one to develop the Halfaya field, with its estimated 4 billion barrels in reserves.
Sitting on the world's third-largest proven oil reserves, Iraq currently produces only 2.5 million barrels per day, with about 1.9 million barrels a day exported.
Crude oil sales account for approximately 90 percent of the Iraq government's budget.
Venezuela
Scientists working for the U.S. Geological Survey have announced new estimate that Venezuela's Orinoco belt region may hold twice as much oil as previously thought, BBC News reported.
U.S. Geological Survey geologists now estimate the area could yield more than 500 billion barrels of "technically recoverable" oil.
Venezuela holds the largest oil reserves outside the Middle East, previously estimated at proven reserves of 260 billion barrels, Corsi noted.
"Knowing the potential for extractable resources from this tremendous oil accumulation, and others like it, is critical to our understanding of the global petroleum potential and informing policy and decision makers," said USGS Energy Resources Program Coordinator Brenda Pierce. "Accumulations like this one were previously very difficult to produce, but advances in technology and new understandings in geology allow us to assess how much is now technically recoverable."
USGS scientist Christopher Schenk explained, "Heavy oil is the type of oil that is very thick and therefore does not flow very easily. As a result, specialized production and refining processes are needed to generate petroleum products, but it is still oil and can generate many of the same products as other types of oil."
Peak-oil hoax continues
Still, the International Energy Agency claims non-OPEC oil production, accounting for approximately 60 percent of total world oil production, will peak in 2010, with global peak oil arriving by 2030.
"Even today, it takes wildcat drillers like Texas billionaire William "Tex" Moncrief to prove the peak-oil theorists wrong," Corsi wrote.
Now that Mexico has found the Tiber field, yet another 3 billion-barrel oil field in the Gulf of Mexico, Moncrief is betting that the secret is drilling deeper than conventional "fossil-fuel" petro-geologists typically drill.
The USGS estimates that worldwide consumption of oil was 85.4 million barrels in 2008.
The three largest consuming countries were the U.S. with 19.5 million barrels per day, China with 7.9 billion barrels per day and Japan with 4.8 million barrels per day.
