Investors in Malaysia, should think TWICE, before they REACH out, to invest in new oil and gas ventures on Bursa Malaysia, that will REQUIRE hundreds of MILLIONs of RINGGIT to explore for oil .
Finding fresh supply, may NO longer be akin to hitting the JACKPOT.
READ the Article below and FIND out WHY
By
The New York Times
HOUSTON — Global oil markets are flooded with cheap crude, and concerns about climate change are growing louder. The last thing the world seems to be craving is the discovery of new large oil and natural-gas fields.
But such fields have been found in the last month. And two of them are in the United States — one in Texas and the other off Alaska.
The new finds, while still preliminary and in need of more testing, could further cement two realities of the energy business: oil prices could stay low for a long time, and oil companies will keep seeking to increase their reserves for future production.
Exploration cutbacks
The discoveries have been hailed by the oil industry, even though companies have largely cut back on exploration over the last two years in an effort to reduce costs as oil prices fell from over $100 a barrel to roughly $50 a barrel. Along with that enthusiasm is the view that prices will recover by the end of the decade.
Yet that view contradicts the opinions of many environmentalists and independent energy experts. They say that the world needs to keep most of the remaining hydrocarbons in the ground to meet the broad targets of the Paris climate conference last December, unless extraordinary technical breakthroughs are made to capture carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
In addition, some of those experts say demand for oil will never fully recover because of the emergence of electric cars and conservation measures.
“In today’s energy world, there is a distinctive clash between those who are pushing forward technologies to keep oil and gas squarely under the ground and those who are deploying capital to ensure that there is enough oil and gas if we stay with the internal-combustion engine that we have today,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, director for energy and sustainability at the University of California, Davis.
“In the short term,” she said, “both sides are going to have victories but, in a longtime scale, my belief is we will transition away from oil and gas.”
The new discoveries now fall into the center of that debate. On Tuesday, Caelus Energy announced it had found a field in the shallow waters off the North Slope in Alaska that could produce as much as 2.4 billion barrels of oil, more than half the reserves of Ecuador, an OPEC producer.
A few weeks earlier, Apache Corp. said a long-overlooked field in West Texas contained at least 3 billion barrels of oil and 75 trillion cubic feet of gas.
Together, the discoveries are relatively modest compared to the new-field production earlier in the decade from shale fields opened up by hydraulic fracturing — the high-pressure mix of water, sand and chemicals that blasts hard oil-bearing rocks. But some analysts say they could well be precursors to more discoveries in West Texas and Arctic Alaska
