London Times IF this is true, what does it mean for the future oil price and for the prospect of moving into green energy? Also, what about greenhouse gasses? With oil seemingly running out people took global warming seriously because they were also faced with high gas prices,but, if oil is plentiful I'm worried people will put things off AGAIN until we're in a situation where there isn't another massive cache of oil.
What most people don't realize is, that the Iraqi oil is getting more and more valuable as long as it stays in the ground. So the occupation's unintended effect is to make the prize even more desirable even if they can't really get a hold on it....
More to the point, what does it mean for the US occupation of the country and the siphoning off of its resources?
Actually the biggest oil field is in Canada - about 5 times the size of Saudi Arabia's (approximately 1.3 trillion barrels).
100 more years of nationbuilding. If I could draw, I would make a cartoon, where a dog has its head through a fence and a bone in his mouth. He can not pull the bone through the fence, because the gap is too narrow, but he also can not let the bone go. So he is stuck....
Iraqi oil is mostly light and sweet, cheap to produce and refine. If available in sufficient quantities, it is capable of controlling the market - the owners of the Iraqi field can make more money at any given price, and can undercut any rival's price without losing money, and can specify the currency in which oil shall be bought and sold worldwide. Canadian tar sand and shale oil is expensive to produce, heavy and sour, and only worth while at quite high prices. The problem is not a world running out of oil, but a dependent world running out of cheap oil - oil so cheap ordinary people can throw it on their lawn grass for extra color, burn it in enormous car engines for a little extra kick out of a stop sign, make throwaway picnic tableware from it not even worth cleaning after eating the potato salad.
You OBVIOUSLY haven't met my paternal grandmother, who also gingerly opened gifts and saved the paper for re-use, mended pants purchased back in the seventies and who awoke bright and early every day of the summer to tend her garden which she subsequently canned and stored for winter use. Would that we all were as frugal. And wise. ~String
The cost of production is not as expensive as people think. What drives the cost of oil nowadays is futures (imo). Yesterday the oil was $135/barrel. 5-6 years ago it was about $50, and 5 years before that it was $10. The difference in the price is not the cost of production. Yes, Canadian oil is harder and more expensive to refine, but Canada = stability, which would keep in check the other forces that pressure the stock price to go so high up.
I wont believe this until I hear it from credible independent sources. Most OPEC nations magically increased their reserve estimates shortly after 1985, when it was decided that production quotas would henceforth be determined by...you guessed it...reserve estimates!
If this is true we might see global oil production plateau for some time, unfortunately for every new field we start extracting from, others go into decline and more and more are going into decline every year, so we need more and more just to replace the old ones.
Our intelligence agencies have found that Stephen Harper is supporting BinLaden and building WMD. 911 Boo .. *heehee teeheehee...* 911 BOO!!!
That's a normal family where I come from. I STILL save wrapping paper. Yearly canning, eating deer meat, growing food, fishing.... I read YEARS ago that Canada can produce a barrel for $12-25 with it's tar oil. But it is dirty.
From Alberta. Daddy was an oilman. Used to be and still is, oil in Alberta/Sask that through old fashioned drilling not as much as the arabias and yes not as easy to get. The Oil Sands thing took off when Oil hit $60 a barrel. That made it profitable, so... you can imagine now. There is a shitload off the coast of Newfoundland, the Premier there held out for big money from U.S oil companies(I wish Alberta and other parts would screw american oil companies and the federal government as badly). They also are going back to old wells from the 40s and 50s and getting the stuff that wasn't worth digging out back then. A lot of you 'mericans don't realize how cheap it is to ship that oil/gas product to your fat country. They made the Alaska Pipeline, in WWII I think. Hey one or two runs through Edmonton, which handles nearly all of western North America's refining! We ship you natural gas too! Guess what California's gas bills to Alberta paid the provincial DEBT! Compare that pipe VS shipping from the middle east and do the fucking math. For people so good a science I mean really, open a fucking geography book. Canada is actually really fucking close, you wouldn't believe it! Ya and no Igloos either. Fact is Oil is an environmental mess. It depletes lakes of water, dirty's up the water, tends to get spilled in water by drunk ship captains. All that is conventional drilling. Tar sands extraction is basically a huge fucking strip mine. But hey everyone love to run people over on the way to the kid's soccer game in that avalanch or hummer3 huh...oh your so fucking cool with your big waste of money and resources cars. We need a big fucking war, to teach people the value of resources. Sorry but I guess I just reached my American ignorance limit, right in this thread and went a little overboard in my last paragraph...whatever.
While the US' goal was to make sure vial resources were controlled in the region, Bush and his cronies invaded to drive prices up. The Bush cabinet members are making unbelievable profits off this war.
