Possible future oil and gas revenues

[Xipe Totec]

Ireland should follow Russias lead, they know how to treat the oil companies.

It`s unlikely they`ll be able to stop national communities from re-asserting their rights resource access once we fall off the peak production plateau.


Also, ibis you provided information on monetary cost/barrel.
Do you have any information regarding energy extraction costs?

I think it`s far more useful to look at our energy future from this perspective rather than $$$ (the computer I`m using is really slow, and its hard to search for information myself...).

[ibis]

Ireland should follow Russias lead, they know how to treat the oil companies.

It`s unlikely they`ll be able to stop national communities from re-asserting their rights resource access once we fall off the peak production plateau.


Also, ibis you provided information on monetary cost/barrel.
Do you have any information regarding energy extraction costs?

I think it`s far more useful to look at our energy future from this perspective rather than $$$ (the computer I`m using is really slow, and its hard to search for information myself...).

Hmm. The problem there is that the figures are far from simple to determine, and the only sources tend to be arguing a particular point of view (because only one side of the argument uses such figures). Energy costs per barrel would include all the necessary equipment manufacture, all the necessary shipping, etc etc, summed over the whole supply chain. Tricky, and tendentious.

The claim, I believe (as far as I can find figures) is that oil has fallen from a 100:1 ratio of energy out to energy in since the 1950's to about 10:1 now. I don't see how that figure can be right, since the most expensive oil is about $10 extraction per barrel, and oil prices are about $70. At 10:1, you'd be saying that $7 of the $10 extraction cost is the cost of energy input - which is very high - particularly when you consider that the major cost for most businesses is salary (I'm assuming that energy input costs the same as energy output in dollar terms). When you consider that the largest producers are still Middle East, and ME oil costs about $1/barrel to extract, those figures make no sense at all - the same high ratio of 70% of extraction costs being energy costs would give us a 100:1 ratio there, which makes the claim that we're at 10:1 globally rather hard to sustain.

Current rigs are, of course, pretty profligate of energy in every way, and there's huge scope for improvement...as usual. At an initial 10:1 ratio, an energy saving of about 30% on your energy input results in a ratio of about 15:1 instead.