The oil and gas business has shown significant changes in recent years, while it has also confirmed some long-established trends. Meanwhile, it should be noted that the large international oil companies are no longer as politically powerful as they once were, particularly in countries that possess the most significant quantities of hydrocarbons. Among other things, national companies originating in emerging countries now control approximately 90% of world reserves. In the Pipeline Oil and Gas Magazine, you can find the best options here.
Particularly in recent times, they seem increasingly interested in the gas business in general and in the shale gas business in particular. Until recently, these last known reserves were challenging to exploit both from a technological and cost point of view, but these problems have now been largely overcome, and the United States has quickly become the first world gas producer. But environmentalists rightly turn up their noses because the chemicals that must be used to extract the gas from the rocks pollute the aquifers. In any case, the technologies used require large quantities of increasingly rare water resources.
In General Ways
More generally, companies in the sector are turning more and more to the exploitation of gas fields. This is because oil is increasingly challenging to find for geological and even political reasons and because gas is also becoming easier to develop in the face of the increasing complexity of oil management.
As for the gas business, among other things, the national companies of the emerging countries are still very much in need of the Western ones, while its market appears even less volatile than that of oil. It is stated by many experts in the sector that gas is less polluting than coal and oil itself, and this appears to be accurate as regards its final use directly. But it should be noted that its manipulation, mainly through product spills during the extraction process and through transport and distribution facilities, contributes to increasing global warming of the planet.
The Perspective of Peak Oil
Despite these innovations, the prospect of the so-called peak oil does not disappear for many, i.e., the forecast that, at the latest within a few years, oil production will begin to decline and, in any case, to be progressively insufficient compared to a demand that grows on average by 1. On this issue, which nevertheless appears controversial, on the one hand, we have a position like that of BP, which, in its annual report entitled Annual Statistical Review of World Energy, affirms that the world’s oil reserves today correspond to about 40 years of consumption, while at the same time the advances in the technologies of the sector, which allow oil to be extracted at ever greater depths and to recover an increasing percentage of hydrocarbons from each field, they will enable you to find and produce much more.
Whatever the correct view on the subject, it appears in any case undeniable that the new sources available will be increasingly expensive, dirty, and unsafe and that in the end, to continue to use oil, it will be necessary to pay even 200 dollars a barrel and to accept a high level of pollution of the planet.
What Does Not Change
Meanwhile, the contribution of fossil energy sources to the destruction of the planet, both in the phases of exploration and extraction on the one hand and in those of refining and combustion on the other, has long been very relevant. From this point of view, the current case of BP could be an opportunity to contain, if not to stop, this havoc in a sector that has long been out of control and full of irresponsible managers and technicians. On the other hand, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico does not appear to be a natural disaster but a consequence of the drastic reduction in the levels of regulation and control in the field of energy.
On the other hand, as already pointed out, the anguish over the possible shortage of energy resources in the near future is growing in the world. You can get out of this dilemma between environmental problems and oil and gas shortages only if you invest adequately in the field of energy savings and green energy, activities which do not seem in any way enthusiastic about investing, as indeed it seems.