**4. Acknowledgment**

162 Fossil Fuel and the Environment

example, its real extent, thickness and porosity, to extrapolate them to similar stratigraphic areas where oil and gas accumulation is expected to be found (Maximov & Vinnikovski, 1983). To sum up, this chapter highlighted how the core concept of proven reserves has grown out of the willingness to strengthen the role of the business association, the American Petroleum Industry- API, in the turbulent waters of the 1920s. Just when the development of geophysical methods opened up the way for more accurate probabilistic assessments of oil reserves, North American institutions refrained from this path, preferring instead to draw their estimates from business-reports and surveys, therefore anchoring the concept on the solid ground of observable actions undertaken by corporations. In quite the opposite camp, the Soviet regime used oil reserve categories as instruments of control and certification thereby shortening the distance between decentralized operative exploration and central management. Although with less success, the regime also tried to use classifications to ease economic transactions by fitting the categories into the bureaucratic sequence of exploration,

The history of estimating oil reserves is a history of long lasting misunderstandings. Although American geologists combined volumetric and statistical methods specifically tailored to the realities of the petroleum industry, the final figures from the first oil survey, released in 1909, came to be interpreted by analogy with the forest conservation practices and policies. The discovery of 15 billion barrels of oil left in reservoirs was regarded as a sort of opening shot in a race against the clock of depletion. "Reserves" were understood as a stock; a finite stock that had to be economized, held back and set aside for future uses or contingencies. By adopting terminologies with familiar nontechnical meanings furthermore colored by the moving debate on presidential powers and federal forest "reserves", geologists ascribed the meaning of the concept to an observable fixed asset. Furthermore, given there was, after all, not so much of it left underground, they conveyed the idea that America was approaching its resource supply potential. What ensued was a sort of pathological split between the "scarcity" and the "overflowing" stances, a split sturdily

entrenched in discourses, social networks, newspapers, journals and institutions.

resources was expected to be overcome by this means.

To counteract looming claims over the need for regulation, the American Petroleum Association set up its own survey, based on preferential access to oilfields and business records, thereby building a spotless reputation for data gathering. Its aim was to replace geological uncertainties by a narrow but accurate appraisal of oil reserves. Between 1925 and 1935, all open possibilities were locked-into the concept of "proven reserves", grounded on technical and economic feasibility. Such closure ran against the grain of current technological improvements as it excluded probabilistic methods of oil finding by the geophysical sciences and neglected the novel enhanced oil-recovery practices. This means that, in the end, economic-political factors superseded the technical and scientific factors. Comparatively, the Soviet system of oil reserve classification attempted to encapsulate technical feasibility and geological certainty in each category. Indeed, its major originality lay in carving up very analytical classifications with data imbued in meta-data. The fundamental asymmetry between decentralized exploration and central allocation of

certification and production.

**3. Conclusion** 

The author wishes to thank The Oil & Gas Journal for allowing the reproduction of copyrighted figures inserted in this chapter. Our appreciation is extensive to the University of Chicago Press and the United States Geologic Survey for their reply acknowledging that the figures inserted in this chapter are currently in the public domain.
