The Deepest Barrel
When the Lights Go Out, What Comes Next?
“Several times in the past we have thought that we were running out of oil, whereas actually we were only running out of ideas." — Parke A. Dickey
The world runs on energy. When energy breaks, everything breaks. And when everything breaks, something new gets built. Every major energy crisis gave birth to something new. First the shock. Then the pain. Then capital moves to fix exactly what broke.
1973. Arab oil embargo. The IEA was born.
1979. Second oil shock. Nuclear and gas expansion followed.
2008. Oil spiked to $147. The shale revolution was born.
2014. Oil collapsed. Shale got leaner. OPEC+ was created later.
2020. COVID sent oil below zero. The industry learned discipline.
2022. Russia invaded Ukraine. Europe built LNG terminals in months.
2026. The US attacks Iran. And what comes next is yet to be decided.
Every crisis on this list created an industry worth hundreds of billions. So the real question is not whether this crisis will create the next one. It will. The question is what it looks like.
What kind of revolution is born when the lights go out?
The Man Everyone Laughed At
Thomas Gold.
He said something that sounded absurd. He said oil was not created from dead dinosaurs and plants. He said oil has been inside the Earth from the very beginning. From the formation of the planet itself. And that it slowly moves toward the surface through cracks in the rock.
As proof he pointed to Titan. Saturn's moon. No plants. No life. Yet NASA confirmed that Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than the entire Earth combined.
Was he right?
For commercial oil, probably not. Oil contains biomarkers that only exist in certain living organisms. You cannot fake that. The science is clear. But one thing has been proven. Abiotic hydrocarbons exist. At the bottom of the Atlantic, in a formation called Lost City, methane seeps from rocks with no biological origin whatsoever. In a Canadian mine nearly three kilometers deep, the same finding.
Gold was wrong about 99 percent of oil on Earth. But he was not crazy.
He convinced Vattenfall, Sweden’s state energy company, to invest 40 million dollars drilling the Siljan crater. The largest meteorite impact structure in Europe. The well reached 6,800 meters. Into granite. Where classical theory says nothing should exist.
They found hydrocarbons. Gases from methane to pentane. And helium concentrations so high that at times half of the gas coming up was pure helium. Commercially it was a failure. But the hydrocarbons were real. They were exactly where no one expected them. And Gold was proven right about at least one thing. There is far more down there than anyone assumed.
He died in 2004 never knowing just how right that instinct would turn out to be. But it is not important whether Gold was right about where oil comes from.
What matters is where oil keeps showing up.
Oil Keeps Showing Up Deeper
Every time science says “nothing exists below this point,” someone drills and finds oil.
Brazil. The Búzios field sits beneath 2,100 meters of water and then thousands more meters of salt and rock in the Santos Basin. Twenty years ago nobody looked there. The prevailing view was that no commercially viable oil could exist beneath such massive layers of salt. In October 2025, Búzios produced one million barrels per day. It is going to reach nearly two million barrels per day by 2030.
Guyana. In 2015 ExxonMobil made a discovery in the Stabroek Block off the coast of one of the poorest countries in South America. In ultra-deepwater. A decade later Guyana is on track to pass one million before the end of 2026. The block holds over 11 billion barrels of recoverable oil across more than 50 discoveries. ExxonMobil and its partners have committed over $60 billion to develop it. By 2030 capacity is expected to reach 1.7 million barrels per day. Guyana went from producing zero oil to becoming South America’s third largest producer in six years.
Namibia. Until 2022 Namibia had never produced a single barrel of oil. Only about 15 offshore wells had been drilled in 50 years, all dry. Then Shell found oil at Graff. TotalEnergies found oil at Venus. Galp found oil at Mopane. In deepwater. Suddenly the Orange Basin held potentially 10 billion barrels or more. Namibia now has a realistic shot at becoming a top 10 global oil producer within a decade.
Vietnam. The Bach Ho field. Oil in fractured granite. Granite is a crystalline rock where oil according to every classical model simply cannot exist. No pores. No permeability. And yet Bach Ho produced roughly 1.5 billion barrels from a reservoir that was not supposed to be there. Deep below the surface.
Gulf of Mexico. BP has drilled to a total depth of over 10,000 meters. Chevron’s Anchor project operates at 20,000 psi. A pressure threshold that was considered the hard limit of what equipment could handle. Now it is in production. US offshore oil production hit a record 714 million barrels in 2025, driven almost entirely by deepwater. And shale is showing its age. The GoM is becoming America’s primary engine of oil growth again.
The pattern is impossible to ignore. Deeper. Bigger. More productive. Every decade the frontier moves further down and the discoveries get larger.
Is Offshore the Next Revolution?
I do not know. Nobody does.
After 2008 it was shale. Maybe after 2026 it is something else. Maybe China unlocks its own shale. Australia is heavily dependent on imported fuel. Yet it sits on an estimated 400 billion barrels of oil equivalent in-place. Maybe we will see its own shale revolution. Maybe small modular reactors finally work. Maybe fusion gets closer than anyone expects. All of these are possible.
But what I do know is that, due to the situation in the Middle East, trillions of dollars will be invested in diversifying away from the Middle East, and all of it at great speed.
And the largest remaining oil discoveries on Earth are offshore. In places where you need the most sophisticated rigs on the planet to drill the first well. Every time they drill deeper, they find more.
And there is one company that has been waiting its entire life for exactly this moment.
Cheers, Sandro
Very thought provoking, Sandro, especially as proponents of that theory are often treated like moon landing deniers or worse. Personally, I think a big shoe to drop will be UK N Sea oil. It saved Thatcher in the early 80s as she reformed the economy, and helped Britain become a half-way prosperous country through that decade. A change of govt now, plus a revealing of the need for energy security will make people realise that developing the fields is an absolute no-brainer, even if it’s not a panacea for the UK’s myriad problems... You can play the N Sea through Harbour Energy (HBR LN), which is also exposed to Argentina.
...If California is the next big story for US oil, it will quite possibly be offshore.