The record $139 per barrel price of oil this week may partly be because the amount of available oil in known reserves has been significantly underestimated, due to a statistical error (failure to combine bell curves for multiple reservoirs), says Richard Pike, a former oil-industry adviser and chief executive of the UK Royal Society of Chemistry

According to published estimates, there are 1200 billion barrels still to be extracted, but Pike says there could in fact be twice as much.