The headline read, “Oil Industry Sets a Brisk Pace of New Discoveries” on the Sept. 24 issue of the New York Times.

“The oil industry has been on a hot streak this year,” the article said. “Thanks to a series of major discoveries that have rekindled a sense of excitement across the petroleum sector, despite falling prices and a tough economy. More than 200 discoveries have been reported so far this year in dozens of countries, including northern Iraq’s Kurdish region, Australia, Israel, Iran, Brazil, Norway, Ghana and Russia.”

British Petroleum recently discovered a huge deep-water field in the Gulf of Mexico. If estimates are correct, it may be the biggest oil field ever in that area. Another huge deposit has been identified off the coast of Sierra Leone. 

“In Brazil, there could be as much as 100 billion barrels of oil offshore, including the Tupi oil field, which is the largest oil discovery in this hemisphere in 30 years.  Brazil is set to become an oil exporter.”

The discovery of 800 million barrels of oil was confirmed in Uganda by Tullow Oil, Europe’s largest independent oil producer. Tullow Oil’s chief executive was quoted as saying “what we think is going to be found in the next few years is about two billion barrels.”

Exxon Mobil has agreed to pay about $4 billion for a minority stake in an oil field off the coast of Ghana, a region that has emerged as a major new petroleum province.

Beyond these specific finds, experts agree that there is a huge amount of oil on Earth, especially beneath the ocean floor and under the Arctic ice. 

One of the largest finds in 2009 was “made by a small producer, Heritage Oil, at the Miran West One field in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. It found nearly two billion barrels of oil.”

How about “peak oil?”

The theory of “peak oil” was developed several decades ago. It suggests that we know where all the oil reserves are located and that we will soon reach a point of maximum oil production. After that peak, oil will become harder and harder to find, leading to a worldwide energy crisis.

Many experts agree that the concept of “peak oil” was simply wrong. There is a lot of oil, most of it undiscovered. With new technology, we can find these reserves as well as squeeze huge amounts of oil from existing wells that old technology could not recover. Extreme deep drilling offshore is now possible, opening reserves that were unthinkable decades ago.

The implications of all this are huge for policymakers.

In the United States, we are pushing the Big Three — now the Small Three — to building small, light, fuel-efficient and even electric cars. But China just bought Humvee. If there is a huge boom in oil production and oil prices stabilize around, say, $50 a barrel, and gas at the pump in most countries hovers near $2.50, people will not want to drive small, uncomfortable and very unsafe small cars. It will only be environmental concerns by consumers that will attract people to these mini cars. The U.S. government will then be stuck with the Big Three “white elephants” owned by U.S. taxpayers and kept alive on a life-support system.

I recently had a discussion with my 220 students in American government class. I was very surprised at their negative and almost hostile reaction to an interview with the president of the Audubon Society that we watched. I’m not sure how committed Americans actually are to environmental policy.

Here are the Gallup Poll results March 2009: “Although a majority of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is either correctly portrayed in the news or underestimated, a record-high 41 percent now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject.”

Another interesting poll number: “The 2009 Gallup Environment survey measured public concern about eight specific environmental issues. Not only does global warming rank last on the basis of the total percentage concerned, either a great deal or a fair amount, but it is the only issue for which public concern dropped significantly in the past year.”

Chew on the political implications of that.

©2009  Steffen Schmidt Prof of Political Science, ISU Reprinted with permission from syndication @ www.insideriowa.com, Iowa’s Internet Magazine.