Today the mind-set of assumed surplus appears to be changing rapidly. People (and governments in particular) are increasingly concerned with where the next barrel is coming from. The prevailing mind set is becoming one of anxiety and insecurity. And not just about the quantity of supply – but who controls it. Concern about climate change adds to our fears. Energy has risen to the very top of political agendas around the world, and it's likely to stay there for the foreseeable future. That is the context in which we are looking for the third trillion.
So where do we look for the third trillion?
I think there are three main areas:

• We can get more out of what we have already discovered.
• We can find more of what we have already got, and
• We can diversify the sources of supply by using different feedstocks.

There is also a fourth major area of opportunity, which is to use what we have much more efficiently, but I do not propose to tackle that here.
I want to look at each of these in more detail through the lens of technology.
Out of the first trillion that have been produced to date, a further two trillion have been left behind. And even small increases in efficiency can make a significant difference in overall yield. For example – a one per cent increase in recovery factor from BP’s reserves yields an additional two billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe). On a worldwide basis, a conservative fivepercent increase in recovery would yield an additional 300–600billion barrels.
Increases in recovery efficiencies will be achieved through the application of technology. Take Prudhoe bay for example. Successive waves of technology have been developed and applied at Prudhoe – horizontal drilling, coiled tubing drilling, miscible gas EOR, gas cap water injection – which have steadily increased the recovery factor from an original estimate of around 40percent to our current estimate of more than 60percent. I am confident this will rise further in the future.
Looking forward, in addition to continuous improvement in existing technologies, I think there are a number of key trends: 4D seismic and other deep reservoir investigation techniques will increasingly give us the ability to track molecules underground. Combined with massive digitisation, this will one day mean that the oil field will become a digital virtual reality. This will greatly enhance our ability to optimise reservoir depletion and overall field management. There is also enormous scope for reducing residual oil saturation. We still have much to learn about the basic science of what happens within the reservoir.
For example, we have recently demonstrated in a number of laboratory and field tests that reducing injected water salinity can increase recovery factors by anywhere between five and 40percent.
Initial estimates suggest that in BP we may be able to add up to onebillion barrels of proved reserves around the world from this technique. The precise chemistry for this dramatic improvement is not yet fully understood but we recognise that improved understanding of the chemistry of the reservoir will enable us to recover more of the oil that is left behind.
As will miscible gas injection – one of the most successful EOR techniques – as we have seen at Prudhoe Bay. To date it has almost always been more valuable to sell the gas if there is a market available. However, this could change radically in the future, if carbon sequestration becomes widespread – as I believe it will. Large-scale carbon capture will lead to massive supplies of carbon dioxide for EOR purposes. Experience with carbon dioxide EOR in the US and elsewhere suggests that it can increase recovery by between five and 15percent.
We are also turning to biology to look for answers. Right now we are looking at microbial EOR – the use of bugs to go in and get out the oil that is left behind, or reducing the viscosity of heavier deposits for increased recovery. Will it work? We do not yet know – these are new frontiers – part of oil exploration in the 21st century.

Secondly is greater discovery. We are going to find additional resources through discovery of more conventional oil and gas. Much of this will come from extending the geography, especially into the Arctic and into ever-deeper water. Enhancements in seismic and other investigative technologies will raise the opportunity to identify new resources. Seeing under salt for example is critical as we move into deeper water. And advances in engineering technologies will enable us to access oil and gas reserves located in extreme environments.
We are approaching the limits in some areas – deep water for example – and we need to develop more advanced materials if we are to access those reserves that today remain beyond our reach.
The third route is through greater diversity of supply. We tend to think in terms of conventional oil and gas, extending into heavy oil – but technology will increasingly allow us to convert any carbon based energy source into most of the useful products currently obtained from oil and gas – and that technology has enormous scope for improvement.
Chemistry, again, will play an important part in creating this fungibility. This is about catalysis and chemical engineering to convert known resources into useful products.
Biology has an as yet unknown role to play here. Rapid progress in bioscience will play a part in creating advanced biofuels which could have a real impact in displacing oil consumption – but beyond that bioscience may have a much larger role to play. Can biology help us to turn coal into methane underground for example? Only time will tell, but such a breakthrough could completely transform the energy scene.
As anxiety about security of supply rises, such conversion technologies will become critical for two reasons:

• They facilitate diversification of our hydrocarbon resource base – allowing us to create familiar and useful energy products from a wider array of carbon sources.
• They allow for more localised production of energy – both coal and bio-fuel production, for example, are located at the centres of demand, and thus provide enhanced security, or at least create an impression of security from anxious governments.

For those who think this is all far-fetched, note that China is already on the case and has made it a national priority. They want to reduce import dependency and are hard at work diversifying their options.
For example, at the moment they have over 80 large-scale projects under consideration and construction to produce liquid fuels, methanol, DME and other products from coal.
So broadening the scope of carbon fuel sources through increased fungibility is an important part of reaching that third trillion. Here again, carbon capture will be a key technology which in turn will lead to more enhanced oil recovery potential from sequestration.
Having touched on where and how, I want to come on to the question of who? In other words, what are the key skills involved in the quest for future energy and producing the ‘third trillion’?
Part of the answer of course will be in all our traditional disciplines such as geo-science, reservoir engineering, petro-physics. And other traditional disciplines in drilling, deepwater engineering, arctic engineering, and so on.
But as I have tried to highlight earlier, three other skills sets will also be critical in the future:

• The future is digital. Over the next decade or so, most technology will converge in the digital space. Distinctions between classical science and engineering and the IT department will disappear and these skill sets will cohabit in a digital world.
• The future is chemical. Chemistry, and chemical process engineering, will be the major factor in enabling the conversion of any carbon source into useful energy products. Improved understanding of subsurface chemistry will also help us to get more oil out of the ground.
• The future could be biological. The rate of scientific discovery in the field of biology is extraordinary right now. The Human Genome project started in 1990 and took 10 years of a global effort to get a ‘rough draft’. A human genome can now be sequenced in a month. And biologists tell me they have only just begun – comparing biology today with the stage that the electronic industry was at when the first transistor was made in 1954.

The true significance of biology is yet to unfold, but there is enormous scope for the application of the most rapidly evolving branch of science to the problem of energy.
But I believe there is an even more fundamental shift that we need to make if we are going to maximise our technologies, talents and resources. And that is in the way we think about and execute R&D.
Our industry has been very successful in developing the technology to meet the needs of our growing number of customers around the world. However, the energy world is evolving rapidly and the industry is not set up to make the advances needed in a timely fashion.
The oil industry spends less on R&D than any other industrial sector. The oil industry takes longer to develop new solutions – than any other industrial sector.
The level of R&D spend and the pace of innovation in our sector may have been sufficient in the past but – due to the complexity and scale of the challenges we now face – this is no longer the case.
Accessing the third trillion is not just about making incremental changes to the current model (although that will be important). It is also about developing a whole new set of skills and a new mind-set that we don't currently own.
For example, creation of common technology roadmaps could allow us to advance technology in a far more cohesive and efficient manner, while still competing intensely on the development of individual products.
So, in conclusion, where will we find the resources? The solution lies in: more recovery – from what we have already found; more discovery – of conventional resources; and more diversity – broadening the frame of where we get the oil.
How will we obtain them? The short answer is ‘not alone’. We need a cross-disciplinary approach – that draws from a wide range of scientific and technical skills and knowledge: chemical, biological digital and more. And we have to change the R&D landscape – engaging in cross industry collaboration to accelerate the rate at which we develop new solutions.