Do the math…

Just wanted to post one quick comment about the “Huge” Brazillian oil field recently discovered. From the article:

A deep-water exploration area could contain as much as 33 billion barrels of oil, an amount that would nearly triple Brazil’s reserves and make the offshore bloc the world’s third-largest known oil reserve, a top energy official said Monday.

Unfortunately, the US consumes about 20 million barrels of oil per day (cite). One billion = one thousand million, so this gigantic, third largest oil field in the world, holds only about 1500 days, or five years, of current US consumption. Or, given that the US is about 25% of world oil consumption, only slightly more than a year’s worth of global oil production. And that assumes consumption stays static and doesn’t grow. And this is assuming the oil field is, indeed, this large (note the use of weasel words in the original article- it may be this large, or it may not be. The large print giveth and the small print taketh away).

This is big news, in one sense- we’ve been granted one more year. But that’s all.