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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (389583)	6/9/2008 9:56:50 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1578288

The recovery cost for conventional oil wells can range from $1 to $6 per bbl. Recovery of Candian oil sands is estimated at C$12/bbl. Obviously, the cost are slightly higher if the oil sands are deeply buried. Still, with price/bbl at over $100, there is little doubt that oil sands become very economically recoverable. When you can pump oil out of the ground for less money, obviously, VZ is going to prefer that over mining oil sands. That is not, in any way, to suggest they aren't economically recoverable. What I know about the oil sands in Canada is what it says down below. As you can see, production costs are greater than your $12 per barrel figure. The few companies I follow that are involved in oil sands development were supposed to make a profit on their oil sands facilities last year. To my knowledge that did not happen........as I understand it, part of the problem is that production costs, esp. repairing environmental damage to the surface, continue to rise rapidly. Its possible that with oil prices so high companies involved in the oil sands are now doing well but I haven't seen that spelled out anywhere. I admit that student teaching has kept me from following these companies as closely as I once did. "With the development of new in-situ production techniques such as steam assisted gravity drainage, and with the Oil price increases since 2003, there were several dozen companies planning nearly 100 oil sands projects in Canada, totaling nearly $100 billion in capital investment. With 2007 crude oil prices significantly in excess of the current average cost of production of $28 per barrel of bitumen. [9] all of these projects appear likely to be profitable. However, bitumen production costs are rising rapidly, with production cost increases of 55% since 2005, due to shortages of labor and materials. [9]" en.wikipedia.org