The global oil industry has discovered less than seven billion barrels of oil equivalent so far this year—a drop-off from the 8 billion boe discovered last year. Last year’s total was the lowest since the 1940s. The 2017 figure is down by more than half from the 15 billion boe discovered in 2014-2015, and down sharply from the 30 billion boe discovered in 2012. The plunge is the result of a third consecutive year of relatively low upstream exploration budgets. So many oil companies slashed their spending on exploration when the market downturn began in 2014, and they have yet to restore that spending to anything close to pre-2014 levels. “We haven’t seen anything like this since the 1940s,” Sonia Mladá Passos, Senior Analyst at Rystad Energy, said in a statement . “The discovered volumes averaged at ~550 million barrels of oil equivalent per month. The most worrisome is […]