Some of the most promising new fields are in deep water off the coast of Brazil. Experts say they could yield as much oil as the North Sea. There have been significant strikes off the coast of French Guiana, north of Brazil, and off Ghana in West Africa.

Iraq is opening up after years of sanctions and war. It could be a second Saudi Arabia.

Russia is increasing production in its Arctic regions, while Canada is steadily producing more oil from its abundant tar sands.

In the United States, the vast deposits of natural gas found in shale rock could transform the country into a major energy exporter.

Those prospects “will certainly have significant impacts on the energy map,” said Maria van der Hoeven, the newly appointed executive director of the International Energy Agency, which advises member countries, including Germany, Japan and the United States, on energy policy.

The prospects are coming into view as revolution and instability threaten new investments in resource-rich countries like Libya and Iraq and after a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan that prompted Germany to declare it would phase out nuclear technology.

Fewer reactors should drastically increase demand for electricity from natural gas, while lower-than-expected growth in energy exports from the Middle East and North Africa could “radically alter the global energy balance,” Ms. van der Hoeven said.

Yet the new opportunities also present companies and investors with a dizzying array of risks — including the high cost of development and exploitation and the possibility that energy prices could fall, especially if the global economy slows drastically and energy demand slackens.

“Quite a few bets are off, if prices drop too far,” said Herman T. Franssen, a senior director at Energy Intelligence, a research company that organizes the annual Oil Money conference with the International Herald Tribune.

Mr. Franssen said oil and natural gas prices would need to remain at relatively high levels to pay for exploration and production in increasingly demanding environments, which produce their own technological risks.

Petrobras, the state-run company leading the deepwater venture in Brazil, is “adding a major challenge on top of a major challenge” by drilling through 2 kilometers, or 1.2 miles, of salt to gain access to oil, said Mark Moody-Stuart, a former chairman of Royal Dutch Shell.

“Salt moves, dissolves and shears away, and it’s highly corrosive,” Mr. Moody-Stuart said. “That kind of drilling worried me in the past, and it worries me now as we head ever deeper.”

Those factors make wells more time-consuming and expensive to complete, but they are no more likely to lead to accidents than conditions at other deepwater drilling sites, Mr. Moody-Stuart said.

Of course, since a well blowout destroyed a rig operated by BP last year, spilling huge amounts of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, concerns have grown about whether companies take enough precautions in increasingly extreme conditions.

It was months before BP devised a way to stanch the leak, and the ability of the U.S. government to manage its oil industry was questioned.

“How do we consider similar scenarios, as operators push increasingly complex projects in West Africa, Brazil and the Arctic?” asked Paul Sheng, the director for oil and natural gas at McKinsey, a consulting firm, referring to the Gulf of Mexico accident.

By comparison, he said, the “resources and technology were available readily in the U.S. to respond.”

Stricter safety controls and higher caps on liability making it harder to obtain insurance could drive smaller companies out of the market. But large international oil companies would be affected too.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/business/energy-environment/a-white-hot-future-for-oil-and-gas.html?partner=rss&emc=rss