EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Can reserve additions in mature crude oil provinces attenuate peak oil?

Samuel Okullo () and Frédéric Reynès ()

Energy, 2011, vol. 36, issue 9, 5755-5764

Abstract: Following the peak in US crude oil production 30 years ago, more and more non-OPEC producers have seen their production decline as a result of resource depletion. OPEC, on the other hand has extracted a comparatively smaller proportion of its reserve base. Given that new non-OPEC discoveries are growing ever limited, we explore the role of reserve additions and OPEC in determining future crude oil supply: we formulate a model that embodies a weak and strong OPEC for various rates of reserve additions in mature crude oil provinces. Using this geo-economic partial equilibrium model that generates a peak in crude oil production, we show that although potential conventional crude oil resources may seem abundant, OPEC strategy could cause substantial crude oil reserve depletion in non-OPEC countries by 2050 (or even earlier) given likely depletion rates. In addition, we find that reducing reserve decline rates in mature crude oil provinces not only extends the time to exhaustion substantially, but also discourages OPEC from engaging in an overly strategic extraction behavior.

Keywords: Crude oil; Reserve additions; Cournot Nash; OPEC; Hotelling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544211003768
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Can Reserve Additions in Mature Crude Oil Provinces Attenuate Peak Oil (2010) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:36:y:2011:i:9:p:5755-5764

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2011.05.051

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:energy:v:36:y:2011:i:9:p:5755-5764