Food for Thought – Alberta vs Venezuela – Who Has More Oil

With all this stuff going on in Venezuela right now, I decided to dive a little more into their reserves to understand how they are claiming to have the largest oil reserve on the planet.

Venezuela’s reserve estimate is very optimistic. Most of the reserves that they are pointing to is from the heavy/extra heavy oil – which is largely un-developed.

Geologically, Alberta oil sands and the Orinoco Oil belt (Venezuela’s primary oil property) are similar: Orinoco: up to 100m net pay (highly variable), 20-40% porosity, 1-10 Darcy’s perm, high oil saturations; Canadian Oil Sands: 30 to 70m net pay, 30-35% porosity, 0.2 to 10 Darcy’s of perm, high oil saturations.

Reserves Venezuela: 303 billion barrels, Canada 171 billion barrels.

Venezuela’s reserve claim is optimistic and is based on gross OOIP and an assumed recovery factor (no economics).

Geologically, the Alberta oil sands would have more reserves than Venezuela using this method.

Both have similar geology but Orinoco is 13 million acres versus Athabasca, Peace River and Cold Lake oil sands region of 34 million acres.

Orinoco Original oil in place (OOIP) 900 to 1,400 billion barrels; Oil Sands OOIP 2.2 trillion barrels.

Alberta alone could have the highest oil reserves on the planet if we used Venezuela reserve methods and that is just referring to the oil sands and doesn’t include any of our medium and light oil fields.

Just some food for thought.