Saudi Oil Minister says they're not running out of oil - prices will remain high

The oil minister of Saudi Arabia, Ali Al Nuaimi, contradicted some of those panicking over the theory of "peak oil," which assumes we are past the ability to meet the growing needs of the world.

As Nuaimi says, by the end of 2009, Saudi Arabia alone will have production capacity of 12.5 million barrels a day; up from the 11 million barrels a day produced now. That doesn't include backup capacity of 1.5-2.0 million.

Nuaimi added that Saudi Arabia plans on adding another 200 billion barrels of oil to the reserves figure.

The purpose in doing this said Nuaimi, is "to reassure the world that we are not going to run out of oil in the next five to ten years as peak oil theorists say."

Not only is that ridiculous, it's far from the truth. Anybody that's heard about the Canadian oil sands and understands its extraordinary potential, knows there's an unbelieveable resource there.

The estimates of oil in relationship to the sands, is it could be over two trillion barrels, and maybe even way beyond that.

Proven reserves are a minimum of 175 billion barrels, which is only second to the 260 billion of Saudi Arabia. Production could reach as high as 3 million barrels daily by 2020, and even may reach 5 million barrels a day by 2030.

If the barrels of oil in the Canadian sands are close to estimates, it will make Canada the energy leader in the world.

Couple that with the two recent discoveries of oil below the ocean by Brazil's Petrobas, and you can see the reserves of oil are huge. That doesn't take into consideration that the new technology being used to discover these fields have just been employed recently, and much of the oceans haven't even been searched yet.

Formerly you couldn't see beneath the ocean floor because of salt deposits to discover oil or gas, now you can.

The Tupi oil field may yield up to 8 billion barrels of oil, with initial production expected to be at about 100,000 barrels a day.

The other recently discovered field is called "Juniper," and is similar in size to the "Tupi" field, according to Petrobas.

However you want to look at it, oil is plentiful, and it's only a matter of ramping up production.

There's a lot of great investment possibilities with oil, especially in relationship to the Canadian sands. It's something that needs to be researched by those interested in energy investments.