An old gas station

BP has announced the discovery of a ‘giant’ new oil field in the Gulf of Mexico.

The company currently produces the equivalent of 400,000 barrels of oil a day there, making it the largest producer of oil and gas in the gulf.

According to a BP spokesperson, the field is one of the largest discovered in recent years at a size of three billion barrels.

BP need to run further tests on the ‘Tiber’ well, currently drilled to a depth of well over 10,000m, in order to determine the actual amount of available oil in the field.

Once they have conducted these tests, they will be able to ascertain the amount of oil they can practically pump out of the field, which is usually no more than 30 to 40%, or one billion barrels in this case.

Three weeks
David Strahan, Author of The Last Oil Shock says that, realistically, this oil will only serve the World’s oil needs for about three weeks before it runs out. In an interview with the BBC World Business Report he said,

It’s a pretty chunky find by today’s standards…they only manage to extract about 40% of what’s there so that’s about 1.8 billion barrels…but we consume about 30 billion barrels a year, so it’s about three week’s worth.

The naming of just three week’s supply of oil as a ’giant’ find, is seen by some as a stark reminder that we are nearing the end of our oil supplies and need to move quickly to come up with sustainable alternatives.