Joe Romm has the right take on yesterday’s announcement of a “massive” new oil find in the Gulf of Mexico:
The discovery doesn’t prove we have ‘abundant’ oil reserves, as [House Natural Resources Committee Chair Doc Hastings] claims. It proves the exact opposite, that ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ can’t solve our problems. Steve Greenlee, president of Exxon Mobil’s exploration
business, unintentionally admitted that when he said, “This is one of the largest discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico in the last decade.”
One of the clearest indications that the planet is running out of oil is the fact that discoveries of giant oil fields have slowed so dramatically in the past couple of decades. This new field in the Gulf is supposed to hold 700 million barrels of recoverable oil, which puts it at the low end of the category (a “giant” oil field contains 500 million barrels or more of crude), and these days that counts as a major find. But historically speaking, this is a pipsqueak, and we’re finding damn few fields of even this size. The fact that this is so big a deal is a bad sign for the oil industry.
