I would like to take one of the points made by the Israeli audience member whose name I can't remember. He didn't accept that this war about oil. His reasoning was that in simple economic terms the cost are much greater than the benefits in terms of oil production. If the war costs 1 billion dollars a day and let's say it goes on for 40 days that's 40 billion dollars. He would argue that the amount of oil needed to justify that is so great that the motive has to be something else.
I have reproduced below a table for the top 20 countries in the world for each of Oil Reserves, Production and Consumption. As is noted below these are only estimates but it gives us at least an indication of the kind of volumes involved.
We can see that Iraq is number 2 in the world in terms of reserves, number 12 for production and not on the list for consumption. Iraq's reserves are estimated to be 112,500,000,000 barrels of oil.
So it seems that there is enough oil in Iraq to at least ask questions about the motive for the war.
However, there is a crucial point to be made here and that is that the energy companies wont be paying for the war; that will be paid for by the US and UK taxpayers and others.
Whether the war costs more than the value of the oil reserves is largely irrelevant. The public will pay for the war and the oil companies will profit from it without paying a penny.
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Note: The estimation of resenes is fraught with politics and guesswork. The two annual industry benchmarks are compiled by World Oil and Oil and Cas lournal largely bom data provided by individual countries. Both outfits have placed "proven" global reserves at about 1 trillion barrels for most of the last decade. In contrast, in 1995 PetroConsultants estimated "assessed" resenes at 746 billion barrels.
It's suspected that many OPEC countries pump-up their estimated reserves because their production quotas are based on the size of the reservos. In 1988 and 1990, many Middle Eastern countries revTsed their reserves upwards dramatically despite no major new discoveries. From 1986 to 1990, according to data from World Oil and Oil and Cas lournal, global reserves increased a staggering 39 percent bom 708 billion barrels to 983 billion barrels.
Created By: tony thegreek