Falklands oil: 200 million barrels — worth £17 billion

Rockhopper Exploration, the North Falkland Basin oil and gas exploration company, has announced that the Sea Lion 14/10-B exploration well has encountered significant oil. The Sea Lion Prospect is located on Licence PL032 which is 100% owned and operated by Rockhopper.The discovery was made using the Ocean Guardian, a 14,400-tonne rig that was towed 13,000km miles from Scotland last autumn. The journey took six months. The Ocean Guardian is set to drill another four wells around the Falklands over the next few months. A Rockhopper spokesman said that the company had encountered a 53m-thick deposit of oil distributed in several layers. The largest was 25m thick.

Richard Rose, an analyst at Oriel Securities, the City firm, said that the find was “very significant” and could amount to 200 million barrels of oil — worth £17 billion at current prices. “That’s pretty chunky,” an industry source said.

Happy Talk: 500bn barrels of crude oil

Oil companies from around the globe are lining up to participate in the Carabobo oil drilling project, which seeks to open-up untapped fields of tar-like crude in the eastern Orinoco region. This is the most touted drilling project in the region since the 1990s, when oil companies such as ConocoPhillips (COP), Total S.A. (TOT), Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) and Chevron Corp. (CVX) built massive extraction and upgrading projects in the area.

The initial opening of the Orinoco oil belt resulted in a major production boost in the region, but ended in legal controversy, when state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. took over control of the projects in 2007 under a new hydrocarbons law. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips left, starting arbitration proceedings against the country. Chevron, Total and other international companies stayed.

Companies that in recent months have shown interest in making a bid for the Carabobo project include China National Petroleum Corp., or CNPC, Total, Spain's Repsol YPF SA (REP, REP.MC), Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSA, RDSA.LN) and India's Oil & Natural Gas Corp., or ONGC (500312.BY). Scientists working for the US Geological Survey say Venezuela's Orinoco belt region holds twice as much petroleum as previously thought.

The geologists estimate the area could yield more than 500bn barrels of crude oil. Saudi Arabia has proven reserves of 260bn barrels.

Incentives for states to raise production

The 2010 mean demand estimate of 86.3 mb/d compared to December global supply of 86.2 mb/d, on an unexpected rise of 270 kb/d, suggests that supply is gaining while demand growth, rooted in non-OECD developing Asian countries, is less than stable. Also important are upside supply surprises from the OPEC 12, which prove that there are incentives for the cartel member states to raise production levels at these prices. here