It is, he insists, a better indicator of a firm's underlying valuation than proven reserves alone.
With 133 billion barrels of proven reserves, it is the world's second-largest petro nation, after Saudi Arabia.
The company has proven reserves of 3.1 billion boe (barrels of oil or the natural gas equivalent).
As a result, proven reserves of oil are actually larger today than they were three decades ago.
While this oil-soaked region has 77 billion barrels of proven reserves, most of this vast landmass is unexplored.
Indonesia has few proven reserves, but high prices may well spur further exploration.
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This fate would undermine the rational for additional private-sector investment, resulting in fewer discoveries and smaller total proven reserves.
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Last month Shell, an Anglo-Dutch oil giant, shocked investors by admitting that it had overstated its proven reserves by 20%.
Total is one of the largest integrated energy companies in Europe with more than 11 billion barrels of proven reserves.
As with all oil and gas plays, this stock will trade on its discoveries and any dramatic increases in proven reserves.
Over the past 20 years, global oil consumption has increased by 30%, but proven reserves have increased at twice that rate.
After all, Russia is by far the world's biggest producer and exporter, and holds a quarter of the world's proven reserves.
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The cuts in proven reserves that will result are a heavy price for a company that is already short of oil.
His acreage, he thinks, sits on top of some 10 billion barrels of oil, almost equal to the proven reserves of ChevronTexaco.
It's a situation that's difficult to understand considering Venezuela is a petro-state with the largest proven reserves of oil on the planet.
Sudanese Energy Ministry officials estimate proven reserves in the Melut Basin at 700 million barrels and total reserves at five billion barrels.
Proven reserves are sufficient to supply more than 40 years of demand, but the reality is likely to be well over 100 years.
The company reckons it could extract up to 430, 000 barrels of bitumen each day from its 195 million barrel proven reserves in Alberta.
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Another important thing to look at is reserve life index, or how many years of oil remain in proven reserves, at current production rates.
Chief Executive Finian O'Sullivan, a geophysicist, has 85 million barrels of proven reserves on tap, with 20 wells in exploration in Turkmenistan, Congo and Egypt.
The estimated size of the mineral discovery is estimated to be 1, 000 times more than the current proven reserves, which are mostly located in China.
Fossil fuel resources are large and proven reserves continue to expand, permitting supply to increase to meet rising global demand for much of this century.
Iraq's proven reserves are second only to those of Saudi Arabia.
To some extent, these companies believed it was easier to "drill" on Wall Street by buying proven reserves than to actually implement a successful drilling program.
Some estimates place global unconventional gas resources at about 33, 000 trillion cubic feet, or about five times the amount of proven reserves at the end of 2009.
Exxon Mobil and Chevron, with the least exposure in terms of production and proven reserves, are the least exposed of the top 20 largest oil companies.
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"Proven reserves of hydrocarbons are estimated at 12.2 billion barrels of crude oil and 4.5 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, " said Abdelhamid Zerguine, head of Sonatrach.
OPEC, which is dominated by Middle Eastern producers, owns three-quarters of the world's proven reserves (see chart), it currently produces only 41% of the world's annual oil supply.
As per the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) data, as at the end of 2010 the North Dakota region had 1, 185 billion cubic feet of proven reserves of shale gas.
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