I'm sure oilco's geologist have models of the return on investment of this. We now the curve for the new finds since 100 years, which is logistics with a peak in the sixties, we could guesstimate the amount of cash put in exploration by the majors (I don't think the national oilcos did a lot of exploration until recently, and their playing field is often limited to their borders).
Put in a fudge factor <<1 to model the fact that there has been more continental crust explored than is left to explore and that it will get worst as more cash is poured in the effort.
Wild yet low-risk bet: over time, an exponentially growing amount of cash will be spent to discover an exponentially shrinking amount of oil fields (by cumulative size, the number of stranded fields will be very large on the contrary). So I think we could write:
K.cash -> X bbl oil fields where K=exp(-big time the time integral of oil fields already discovered at the moment under consideration) Pierre
an oil field is the result of plenty of cash and time, spent on hardware and staff roaming hostile parts of the planet in search for oil.
That's covered by capital, machinery and labor inputs. Ultimately, you still need the actualg geological structure, and that one is not going to be an output in a timeframe that makes sense for a purposes. Just define "oil field" in a narrow sense, and you bump against that problem again. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Of course, we are not in a pure Leontieff model since the coefficient of oil discovery will vary over time. The oil itself will change also, making refining less efficient, etc...
But this was to be expected: we are modeling a depletion process, which is irreversible just like entropic decay. The pure leontieff model is reversible if you keep all coefficients constants, it is always conceivable to return to a previous state of equilibrium. Which will not be possible with oil: once it's all CO2 in the stratosphere we won't be able to drive so many hummers... Pierre
