Although the question of reserves was explicitly not the subject of this post, it is an important one. Unfortunately we only have semi-reliable reserves data for non-OPEC countries. OPEC reserves data is notoriously opaque and unverifiable, and has been the subject of violent debate for decades now. If you want to understand the issues with that data, I suggest you check out my book, Profit from the Peak, where I explored them in some depth. One good study is "The End of Cheap Oil" by Colin Campbell and Jean Laherr??re:
http://dieoff.org/page140.htm (Scientific American, March 1998), but there are literally hundreds of papers on the subject of reserves data. It's a complex and difficult subject.
One example: Saudi Arabia has claimed around 260 billion barrels of reserves for the last 20 years straight, while producing 8 to 9 billion barrels per year, and without declaring any new discoveries. For another: In 1985, Kuwait increased its reserves by 50%, without new discoveries. In short: those numbers simply cannot be trusted, nor verified. Serious observers regard them as political fictions, and indeed there were some damning revelations about them exposed in Wikileaks.
Just because the reserves numbers aren't going down while production continues does NOT mean that the equivalent amount of new oil has been moved up into the reserves category. It means that the data is bad!
The world has been consuming more oil than it discovered since the mid-1980s. In a recent Exxon paper, "2012 Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040," they note, "More than 95 percent of the crude oil produced today was discovered before the year 2000. About 75 percent was discovered before 1980." According to IEA's World Energy Outlook 2011, an estimated 16 billion barrels of crude reserves were discovered in 2010. But the world consumed 27 billion barrels of crude in 2010.
In any case, I would not use the CIA Factbook as a data source, since they do not indicate where their data came from (not that I found in a cursory look, anyway), or how they define it. EIA, IEA, BP, and the Oil & Gas Journal are the data sources most analysts trust (with an asterisk).
Back on topic: the distinction between regular crude oil and the various categories of unconventional oil is not artificial at all. Unconventionals are not equivalent to crude on several important counts, including, but not limited to, the production cost per BTU. In fact, a new barrel of syncrude from bitumen costs three to four times as much to produce as an old barrel of crude. This is a subject I intend to write about it in a future article. Most importantly: The world still relies on conventional crude oil for about 85% of our total liquid fuel supply.
