Big New Oil Find in Indonesia?

Platt's is reporting the discovery of a huge possible find in Indonesia.

Indonesia's BPPT, a state agency which assesses technology and its applications, and its German counterpart Bundesanstalt fuer Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe have found what they believe are huge potential hydrocarbon resources offshore Aceh province, a BPPT official said late Monday.

Badan Pengkajian dan Penerapan Teknologi and Germany's BGR believe there may be between 107.5 billion and 320.79 billion barrels of oil equivalent of oil and gas around Simeulue island, D.Jenie, BPPT's chairman, said.

If this is true, it would catapult Indonesia into the top rank of oil producers worldwide. If these reserves were proven, they would end up ranked above Kuwait in the world for proven reserves (and possibly above Saudi Arabia). Of course, at this point, they are not even "possible reserves."

This was discovered completely by accident.

The hydrocarbon resources were found during a recent 2-D survey to look at the underwater geological changes due to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

"Our main goal was to examine the change in the geological structure of the sea after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami," the head of the research team, Yusuf Surachman, said. "We plan to send another research vessel to get three-dimensional data," he added.

This assertion caused my brother, who works in the seismic industry, to call bullshit. He says that there is no way you could even begin to estimate reserves based on a 2-D survey. So this whole story sounds like pure hype to be taken with a boulder of salt--but worth monitoring, nonetheless.