Oil Comparison

This morning there were a few stories on NPR about Iraqi Oil Production. There's some no bid contracts going out to get the Iraqi fields producing.

That link goes to a few of those stories. Although there were numbers in the radio report that I don't see here. One of those numbers was about increasing output by a million barrels a day in the first year, and then keep adding an extra million barrels for the next five years, and being able to do that without much problem. There was also the statistic for an oil well in the US, a good well, producing about 100 barrels of oil a day. In Iraq an average well can produce 100,000 barrels a day.

Still think we can drill our way out of this?

The off coast oil is estimated to be 18 billion barrels (this, again, is the mean, the odds favor much less). In five years, about the earliest time that oil could be online, Iraq could be producing 1.6 billion barrels of oil a year, extra. Without breaking a sweat. Our output would be much less (as we would just begin tapping the reserve).

Ain't math fun.