Chevron Posts Strongest Year Of Crude Oil Discoveries Since 2011 -- February 2, 2018

I have a fairly long post with updates regarding all the hand-wringing about "decreased conventional discoveries" and how that will lead to a scarcity of oil in the "near future." Some refer to this as "peak oil."

Two graphs at that link:

Today, Don sends me the link to this article from Bloomberg: Chevron posts strongest year of crude discoveries since 2011.

Chevron found enough untapped fields to replace 155 percent of the crude and gas it pumped last year, the highest reserves replacement since 2011. The biggest additions were in the U.S. Permian Basin and Australia, the company said in a statement on Friday.

Yes, much of that is shale, but oil is oil.

From MarketsInsider:

"We replaced more than 150 percent of the reserves we produced, and reached several significant upstream project milestones in 2017,” Wirth added. "These included our first LNG shipments from Train 3 at Gorgon and Train 1 at Wheatstone in Australia. We also posted impressive production growth in the Permian Basin in the U.S.”

The company added approximately 1.54 billion barrels of net oil-equivalent proved reserves in 2017. These additions, which are subject to final reviews, equate to approximately 155 percent of net oil-equivalent production for the year. The largest additions were from the Permian Basin in the United States and the Gorgon Project in Australia. The company will provide additional details relating to 2017 reserve additions in its Annual Report on Form 10-K scheduled for filing with the SEC on February 22, 2018.

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When Your Home Really Is Your Castle

In today's print edition of The Wall Street Journal, the "Mansion" section features three homes from across the US modeled after medieval castles that are up for sale.

We are quite familiar with this one, just a few miles down the road from us, in Southlake, Texas: if there are no soccer fields available, the lot is big enough for teams to practice.

The mansion above does not have a wall, per se (it has a wrought-iron fence), unlike the house of Joe Kennedy, III, who is very, very much against the Trump wall. Via Twitter, posted earlier today:

And, wow, that's an awful-looking wall.