Quote Originally Posted by 99 GT Coupe View Post
where are you getting 400billion? the article says 200 billion. A super giant field with 1billion barrels or more of extractable crude will be completely depleted in 18 days at the current global level of demand. my mistake was taking into account global levels not us levels of demand so that was my mistake.

secondly spudding wells on existing fields isn't nearly as expensive as opening an entirely new field. No one company is able to develop and bring on line a new field by them selfs a consortium must be made of companies willing to lay out the money in order to get a new field up and running....and due to US law, these must be U.S. held companies. Factor in that 85% of your costs come before you get a drop of oil out of the ground and yeah it's unlikely that many companies are going to want to front this kind of money...so we're back to the group plan.

Lastly, the companies probably won't extract the majority of the oil they find. In order to make wall street happy a company must put back, on their books in reserves, the same amount of oil they extract if not more.

you want gas prices to come down, since the price of crude is really a moot point anymore, the way you do it is you have to force the oil companies to start running their refineries at full capacity rather then artificially restricting supply to raise prices at the pump. This can be done via taxes if necessary.
you need to read to "whole' article.