WORLD PETROLEUM SNAPSHOT

This page is intended to provide a visual guide to global and regional data on the rates of the consumption of petroleum, its rates of discovery and estimated reserves for future exploitation. It provides links to data sources used by the US and other governments, their agencies, the Petroleum Industry, Economists and other interested parties.

The page has a variety of intended potential audiences that include students studying petroleum geology at the University of South Carolina, other Universities and persons who are trying to make sense of the mass of varied and confusing information available on petroleum resources, the rates of their discovery and exploitation.

We try in this page to provide information that will enable people to see where most of the oil of the world is currently located, and the rates at which these reserves are being drawn down.

As this page grows, we hope to show and compare maps of oil field locations, and list the rocks that are producing petroleum in these fields. We intend to ask questions that you can answer yourselves from this page and that will highlight where most the world oil is! For instance, did you know that all the oil reserves currently believed to be available in Nigeria are equivalent to a large field in Iran or that if the best estimates of the reserves in the Wildlife Reserve of Alaska are correct, then the US could consume these reserves in 1.5 years or the World in 5 months?