The oil industry has been working hard to find new oil reserves, and so far this year the efforts have been paying off.

It has been a year with some major discoveries that have put the oil industry in a good position to make it the year with the highest level of new discoveries since 2000.

A big reason for the increase in discoveries is improvements in technology that has allowed oil hunters to drill deeper and break through tougher rocks than they were previously able to do.

The "Tiber" field discovered by BP in deep water about 250 miles off the coast of Houston is probably the deepest drill on record, more than 6.5 miles. deep. Analysts estimate that the field holds about 3 billion barrels of oil, of which 1 billion barrels are recoverable with today's technology.

BP PLC (NYSE: BP) also owns another big oil field called "Kaskida" in the Gulf of Mexico. Together these two fields could boost BP's oil production from 400,000 barrels per day to 650,000 bpd.

Oil rose for a fourth straight day Thursday as Tropical Storm Gustav prepared to enter the Gulf of Mexico causing oil / natural gas companies to evaluate oil rigs in the area.

Oil rose above $120 a barrel earlier Thursday morning, but is now trading below that level. Oil has risen about $10 in a week on hurricane concerns and geopolitical tensions.

The other, major energy commodities also jumped Thursday morning on news of storm's likely track. Unleaded gasoline rose 6 cents to $3.12 per gallon, heating oil increased about 6 cents to $3.32 per gallon, and natural gas climbed 8 cents to $8.69 per million BTUs.

As of 8 a.m. EDT, Gustav was located about 70 miles east of Jamaica at 17.8N Latitude and 75.6W Longitude, moving west/southwest at 6 mph, with top wind speeds of 70 miles per hour, according to weather.com. Forecasters expect Gustav to track west/northwest, enter the Gulf of Mexico, strengthen to hurricane status, and strike the U.S mainland between Houston and the Florida Panhandle, with the most likely landfall being Louisiana.

The week has barely gotten under way and oil has already reached new record highs. Last Friday we saw a new intraday high of $92.22, but that record was shattered today with prices moving up as high as $93.20 earlier in the session, and are currently trading up $0.97 to $92.83.

Last Friday I took a look at a look at several factors that have been pushing prices higher, and these are all still in effect, but today's move comes from a new source of supply concerns out of Mexico. Today's jump to new highs was spurred on by news that a storm in the Gulf of Mexico was forcing Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, to cut back about 600,000 barrels a day worth of oil production.

Pemex announced yesterday that bad weather had already forced the oil company to cut back about 200,000 barrels of production and that another 400,000 barrel cut was on the way. The company produces on average around 3.2 million barrels a day.

Chevron Corp (CVX) announced today that they had successfully finished a test run at their Jack field in the Gulf of Mexico. During the test, Chevron reported that they, along with partners Devon Energy Corp. and Statoil ASA, were successful in producing around 6,000 barrels a day from the company's Jack well, a five-mile-deep well in the Gulf of Mexico's lower tertiary range.

While you may be thinking that 6,000 barrels a day output is not much to be hopeful about, what this does mean is that Chevron and other big oil companies now have the motivation to put more resources to work in the area. The area in question, the lower-tertiary range, is deeper than previously-exploited fields in the Gulf, with much much older rock formations. Many companies have been fearful of exploring these areas out of concerns that the rocks in question would be too tight from which to pull oil out, without the costs being too high to justify. Well, according to Larry Nichols, Devon's chairman and chief executive, that is just not the case and the area can be developed profitably.

If the area is successfully developed, the results could be phenomenal. Estimates for the recent findings in the Gulf of Mexico's lower-tertiary range anywhere from three to fifteen billion barrels of reserve oil, although much of the area has yet to be explored at all, and the actual finding could be even higher than estimated.