I Loves Olive Oyl

The problem with being dependent on data to make decisions: what do you do when there is no data? Well, punt. Let's turn our attention to the oil patch. Crude is quoted at $61/barrel (and change) today, and the blue-eyed Arabs in the Red states are whining poor mouth. Already. Gad.

Here's the dirty secret about oil, or any extractive resource for that matter: marginal cost pricing doesn't work in the short to medium term. Depending on the resource, even long term. The reason is that marginal cost <> variable cost. The latter is what determines whether to power the pumps on existing wells, or not. It is just the cost to run the motors, keep them running, and so forth. Marginal cost is how much to bring *a new* well into production. It's clear that the second number is much higher than the other. And, it explains why the Saudis are willing to keep the pumps running; an existing well is profitable at a very low barrel price. Yes, the petro companies would like to fully amortize all the sunk costs on a well, but they have no control over sunk costs. They're sunk, after all. You're not getting the money back. You kissed it goodbye long ago. So long as you get more for the crude than it cost to get it to the surface, you're ahead. It's just second-grade arithmetic. You could shut the well, hoping that the price will rise soon enough, but so do all the other owners. Who'll blink first? Shut the well, and you lose the moolah, but the other owners don't.

But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow you head clean off, you've gotta ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?

How low Mr. Natural? Hard to say, since nobody seems willing to divulge the number. Easy oil comes from a fresh pipe with sufficient gas pressure to lift the crude to the surface from the deposit. All those gushers from old movies. Variable cost of a barrel from such a well: $0. Nada. Zilch. And so forth.

The Wiki explains the succession of involvement to get crude to the surface. One of the reasons Peak Oil came to be a meme was that USofA production was well (pun intended) into tertiary recovery. That costs rather more to lift. In any case, once the infrastructure to aid lift is in place, the variable cost is the electricity to run the pumps (into and out of the well) and the supply of material to inject. That's mostly water, which is ironic in the case of middle east oil, since there's so little of it nearby.

In sum then, there's money to be made from existing wells even at $50 or $60 a barrel. That's my guess, of course. And, it seems, for the Saudi's too.