Onshore:
Parts of the Canadian, and Russian Arctic and Alaska [mostly ANWR but not solely ANWR.]
Parts of Eastern Siberia [the data is lacking — the Russians may have already have tested this possibility.]
Parts of onshore Africa.
A small area in Eastern Iraq. Western Iraq is probably pie in the sky as their known giant oil fields fall in a fairly narrow band which does not include Western Iraq.
The same is also likely in Saudi Arabia which has been more thoroughly explored than the Saudis are stating publicly. The best chance for largish totally new finds in Saudi Arabia may actually be in the Red Sea rather than the Persian Gulf or “Empty Quarter” areas. Time will tell. [Saudi Arabia does have a couple of very large undeveloped fields that have been know about for a long while. These have had problems either with finding appropriate production technology or with bad oil quality / metal pollution problems. These are going into production in the next couple of years. After that?]
Offshore the list of hopeful areas is longer [Arctic Ocean, Deep Water Mexican Gulf of Mexico, more to come in Brazil, Angola maybe Nigeria or its neighbors — and admittedly a number of other places] but would we [Brazil and similarly Jack II in the U.S. portion of the Gulf of Mexico] be drilling 16,000 foot wells in 7,000 feet of water, 180 miles from shore if the easy stuff had not already been tested? The best news about this new Brazilian find as well as Jack II is the apparent emergence of techniques for exploring under salt deposits which are almost opaque to normal seismic techniques. Once again, I am by no means and expert in this area, but I don’t think they were blindly punching holes through the salt to find out what lays below.
Offshore Florida and the Atlantic Coast don’t look that encouraging, but should be opened for testing. Southern California offshore has some potential, but as I understand it, little chance for giants ... and good luck on getting CA, FL or the East Coast open in the near future.
One other thing about offshore. The Chinese claim to have discovered a very large field in shallow water [Bohia Bay?] fairly recently so I am somewhat hopeful that the best estimates from what I still consider to be the realists are low.
To return to my main point, we need a lot of success and we need it soon or we are fast approaching the peak in oil production.
Sorry about the lack of specificity, but I hope this helped.
That’s very helpful and much appreciated, thank you! I would think also that with prices around $90+ per barrel that “oil sands” in Canada and “Oil shale” in the USA (I understand that those labels are not exactly accurate) become economically feasible and even quite profitable, and those are supposed to be vast deposits to rival Saudi Arabian oil???? Big problem is getting the tens and hundreds of billions of dollar investments for 10-20 year projects (or longer).....
One more caveat. Off shore discoveries tend to decline at a much faster rate than on shore well heads. The extraction rate is much high as the cost per drum is much greater than land based rigs. The drillers milk it fast and big time plus the cheapest rig cost now is about $200,000/day for a jack up,
a floater is much higher.