The Michel T. Halbouty lecture series – funded by the AAPG Foundation – is an ongoing special event at the
AAPG Annual Convention & Exhibition. Lecture topics are designed to focus either on wildcat exploration in
any part of the world where major discoveries might contribute significantly to petroleum reserves, or space
exploration where astrogeological knowledge would further mankind’s ability to develop resources on Earth and
in the Solar System.
This year’s Michel T. Halbouty Lecture speaker is Dr. Thomas S. Ahlbrandt, President, Thomasson Partners
Associates, Inc. and he will discuss his talk: From Petroleum Scarcity to Abundance: Opportunities for the U.S. and World.
For 150 years the hydrocarbon industry has focused on about one quarter of the recoverable oil resource, and we are just now
turning to the vast resource plays that are part of the Total Petroleum System (TPS) assessed by the USGS in 2000 and here
updated through 2012. The TPS concept focused on the source rock and principal reservoir and recognized the conventional
as well as unconventional (resource) components of the petroleum system. However, unconventional resources were basically
only being developed in the U.S. at the time of the USGS assessment and were not included in the 2000 study. The USGS
2000 study, also summarized in “AAPG Memoir 86,” included 149 provinces exclusive of the U.S. and data as of 1/1996. Since
that time, much has changed and the updated views through 2013 for 175 provinces for the petroleum endowment elements
of conventional undiscovered resources, reserve growth, cumulative production and remaining reserves and now amplified considerably by unconventional (or continuous resources) will be presented. The changes in the global hydrocarbon endowment
through 2013 for these provinces are significant with the global oil endowment up nearly 50 percent, gas endowment up by
nearly 25 percent and oil and gas reserves increased each by over 50 percent in spite of 16 additional years of production. The
historical and data driven support for this petroleum revolution will be discussed to address the issue of why have the predicted
global oil and natural gas shortages and demise of civilization by 2010 related to these vanishing supplies not occurred?
Thomas S. Ahlbrandt formed a consulting group (Ahlbrandt Consulting) specializing in conventional and unconventional resources
globally. He also serves as the President of Thomasson Partners Associates, and Senior Vice President of Exploration for Systems
Petroleum all located in Denver, Colorado. Previously he was the Vice President of Exploration for Falcon Oil and Gas in Denver,
Colorado where he managed unconventional oil and natural gas exploration in Hungary (Mako Trough), Australia (Beetaloo Basin),
and South Africa (Karoo Basin). “AAPG Memoir 86: Global Resource Estimates from Total Petroleum Systems” also summarizes
this global petroleum analysis and was the senior author. He has written global resource outlooks for OPEC and recently
completed (January 2013) a book with the Energy Intelligence Group (London), “The Global Petroleum Revolution: A New Era of
Opportunity” which discusses the global petroleum endowment and past and future petroleum forecasts. He recently discovered
petroleum in the world’s oldest petroleum system (1.4 billion year old rocks in the Beetaloo Basin, Australia) and is a contributor to
the recent AAPG volume on the Tethys contributing to the petroleum system evaluation of the Middle East and North Africa.