Britain: Oil reserves found at site near UK's Gatwick airport

A small British oil producer said it had discovered a possible world class oil resource in the countryside to the south of London that could contain billions of barrels of oil.

 The London-listed explorer UK Oil Gas Investments (UKOG) said on Thursday up to 100 billion barrels of oil could lie below the green fields around Gatwick Airport, however it cautioned that only a fraction of that could be recovered.

The news sent shares in the small firm up 200 percent and prompted the national press to dub the area “Britain’s Dallas”. Oil industry analysts struck a note of caution however.

“We think we’ve found a very significant discovery here, probably the largest [onshore in the UK] in the last 30 years, and we think it has national significance,” UKOG Chief Executive Stephen Sanderson told the BBC.

Britain has for decades relied on the North Sea for its oil needs, particularly during the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher’s government reaped the rewards of booming output and high prices. But output there has started to fade since the turn of the century.

UKOG’s oil find is located in Britain’s southern Weald Basin, a largely rural area near the airport which lies adjacent to Europe’s largest onshore oil field, located at Wytch Farm.

Read more: Europe - Oil reserves found at site near UK's Gatwick airport - France 24

Saudi Arabia: "Back off Hosni Mubarak", Saudi King Abdullah warns Barack Obama as Saudi oil reserves estimates are cut by 40%

It was disclosed in the The Times of London that in a "testy" telephone call on January 29, Saudi King Abdullah told US President Obama not to humiliate Mr Mubarak and said the Egyptian leader should be allowed to stay on to oversee the transition towards democracy and then to leave with dignity.

King Abdullah threatened to step in with funding for Egypt if the US withdrew its euro1bn(US$1.35bn) a year aid program. "Mubarak and King Abdullah are not just allies, they are close friends, and the king is not about to see his friend cast aside and humiliated," a senior source in the Saudi capital told The Times.

Saudi King Abdullah, who obviously must be getting very worried about the possible rippling effect of the popular uprisings around the area in support of democratic reforms on his own autocratically ruled country, must have had another shock when Wikileaks revealed that Saudi Arabia has got far less oil than its been saying. According to a senior Saudi government oil executive Saudi Arabia's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels – or nearly 40%.

EU-Digest

The Independent: Warning: World Oil supplies are running out fast - by Steve Connor

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Warning: World oil supplies are running out fast - by Steve Connor

The world is heading for a catastrophic energy crunch that could cripple a global economic recovery because most of the major oil fields in the world have passed their peak production, a leading energy economist has warned. Higher oil prices brought on by a rapid increase in demand and a stagnation, or even decline, in supply could blow any recovery off course, said Dr Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the respected International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, which is charged with the task of assessing future energy supplies by OECD countries.In an interview with The Independent, Dr Birol said that the public and many governments appeared to be oblivious to the fact that the oil on which modern civilization depends is running out far faster than previously predicted and that global production is likely to peak in about 10 years – at least a decade earlier than most governments had estimated.

But the first detailed assessment of more than 800 oil fields in the world, covering three quarters of global reserves, has found that most of the biggest fields have already peaked and that the rate of decline in oil production is now running at nearly twice the pace as calculated just two years ago. On top of this, there is a problem of chronic under-investment by oil-producing countries, a feature that is set to result in an "oil crunch" within the next five years which will jeopardize any hope of a recovery from the present global economic recession, he said.

Calgary Herald: IEA Yedlin: Warning about an oil supply crunch

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IEA Yedlin: Warning about an oil supply crunch

The IEA revisited its forecasts of last year, where it said the world needed to invest $1 trillion a year in order to ensure there would be enough supply to meet growing demand by 2030.

Now it is warning of a supply crunch that will start to be felt by 2012 as a result of the amount of money not being invested in exploring for and developing new oil supply. The biggest pull back in investment, it notes, is taking place in countries that are not members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and in resources that are harder to bring on stream. And yes, Canada is highlighted as having been hit hardest, presumably because of the cost to develop the oil sands. v