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> Taxes are the same here in Norway as is in Australia, but it’s such a richer country. This is not a sensible comparison. Norway produces 313,661 barrels per

> Taxes are the same here in Norway as is in Australia, but it’s such a richer country. This is not a sensible comparison. Norway produces 313,661 barrels per day per million people, which is higher than all other countries besides Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Australia produces 12,010 bbl/day/millon-people, i.e., just 3.8% of Norway's per capita production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ... The extreme amount of mineral wealth that each Norwegian citizen has inherited makes Norway very difficult to compare to non-Arab countries on any issue connected to economics (i.e., basically everything). Relatedly, the cost of living in Norway is much higher than Australia, despite Australia's extreme remoteness. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.jsp https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.js...

dalore 8y ago
As another fellow Aussie emigrant (not to Norway though), I believe they were not only talking about oil resources but all the other natural resources Australia is selling. My bet is Uranium is going to be an important one too in the future.
- jessriedel 8y ago
  Eye-balling the numbers, you'd pick up less than a factor of 5. I encourage you to look at the details and report back. You should also correct for the natural resources that Norway has the Australia lacks, like fish (almost 10% of Norway's exports inclusive of oil!).
  - the_duke 8y ago
    Australia doesn't have ocean access and fishing industries?
    - jessriedel 8y ago
      Fish makes up just 0.13% of Australian exports https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/aus/ https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/aus/ Next time, consider looking the number up yourself and reporting back rather than just asking the question and so forcing me to look up the answer for you (or else look like I'm ignoring the issue).
      - thaumasiotes 8y ago
        Fish being a minor part of Australian exports is a claim with absolutely no relationship to whether or not Australia has fish. You claimed it didn't, and that is not credible.
        jessriedel 8y ago
        In context, my claim was clearly that Australia did not have access to fishing resources that had economic effects that were remotely comparable to its total exports.
  - barrkel 8y ago
    Energy is about 50% of Norway's exports, and minerals + energy is about 60% of Australia's exports. These are extractive industries that are structurally similar. Norway exports about $50 billion USD / year. Australia exports about $120 billion USD / year. This is probably why the Australian is comparing the situation with Norway. https://www.minister.industry.gov.au/ministers/frydenberg/speeches/mining-and-australian-economy-australian-governments-priorities-mining https://www.minister.industry.gov.au/ministers/frydenberg/sp... https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/production-and-exports/exports-of-oil-and-gas/ https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/production-and-exports/expo...
    - jessriedel 8y ago
      I'm aware that comparison he's trying to draw, but the comparison has to be fair. First, most obviously, Australia has almost 5 times the population of Norway! Second, if we're going to start increasing the scope of exports we're including, to make a fair comparison we should include minerals in Norway's total (not just Australia's), and we should really include other resources that Norway has that Australia doesn't (rather than just picking a category where Australia has larger exports). What are the numbers in this case? Again, I think this works out to a per capita endowment of that is still much, much larger for Norway, but you'd actually have to do a bit of work to check.
      - barrkel 8y ago
        Compare respective sovereign wealth funds: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2016/09/24/how-to-not-spend-it https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2016/09/24/h... IMO you're on a hiding to nothing trying to support your position that the comparison isn't valid. The economic export situation is structurally quite similar between Norway and Australia, and the difference in how they've handled it is vast, far greater than any multiple in population.
        jessriedel 8y ago
        Huh? No one disputes that the countries handle things differently. But if you want to say that one way of handling things is better, and the only evidence you give are better outcomes, then inputs ought to be similar. But if one country has 30 times or 3 times the input (corresponding to oil or most natural resources, respectively), then this is a very poor comparison unless you do a lot more work to correct for it.
- aplummer 8y ago
  To OP really between coal and LNG alone dalore is making a fair comparison.
- paulmd 8y ago
  Uranium is actually quite common; it's cheap because it's an extremely controlled market (who are you going to sell it to?) with fairly limited demand (it doesn't take that much uranium to run a power plant or make a nuke, a cube about a meter per side can run a reactor for a year). Because it's so cheap, it's not substantially prospected so there is a good chance there are large reserves that can be exploited if we go looking for them. And, if it comes down to it, we can pull near-unlimited quantities from seawater at $200-1000 per kg (~10x current pricing). The costs of nuclear power generation are almost entirely capital costs and insurance, the fuel costs are practically a rounding error, so this does not substantially change the costs of nuclear power generation. https://www.newsdeeply.com/oceans/articles/2018/06/28/the-nuclear-option-technology-to-extract-uranium-from-the-sea-advances https://www.newsdeeply.com/oceans/articles/2018/06/28/the-nu... So, uranium will probably never be super valuable. Strategically important, and nice to have in a conveniently accessible form, but not economically valuable.
NullPrefix 8y ago
>313,661 barrels per day per million people.... Australia produces 12,010 bbl/day/millon-people Would be way easier to understand the comparison if the notation would be the same on both numbers. I assume bbl means billions of barrels, this means Australia's number is higher by few orders.
- vijayr02 8y ago
  bbl is market jargon for barrels, not billions of barrels...
  - NullPrefix 8y ago
    So why not use the same for both numbers?
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    That's goofy, most abbreviations drop letters rather than adding them.
- aristophenes 8y ago
  They are the same notation, look it up. If Australia was producing 12,010 billion barrels of oil per day per million people you'd probably be able to see that portion of the globe turn black from space, everyone in Australia would have drowned in it and an oil tsunami would be heading towards New Zealand.
cygx 8y ago
Australia produces 12,010 bbl/day/millon-people You should not look at just oil, but natural resources in general (in case of Australia, iron, coal and gold in particular). Norway still comes out on top, but only by a factor of ~2 (cf https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/nor/ https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/nor/ https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/aus/ https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/aus/ ).
- jessriedel 8y ago
  I did, which is already reported further down in this thread, and my eyeball estimate was the Norway exceeded Australia per capita by more than a factor of 4. Happy to see more accurate numbers.
  - cygx 8y ago
    Sure. We're looking for something that's equivalent to Norway's oil industry. According to the links I gave, Norway's top exports are Crude Petrolium and Petrolium Gas, in 2017 accounting for 53% of all exports at $55.8B. Assuming a population of 5.3M, this translates to $10.5k per person. Australia's top exports are also based on natural resources, namely, Iron Ore, Coal Briquettes, Gold and Petroleum Gas, accounting for 60% of all exports at $144.6B. Assuming a population of 24.6M, this translates to $5.9k per person.
    - jessriedel 8y ago
      Thanks. As discussed further down the thread, it is disingenuous to add natural resources to Australia's total but not Norway's total. (Metals and fishing are both 10% each of Norways exports.) This makes it 15.5k per person in Norway, giving a ratio of 3, halfway between the ratio I eyeballed (4) and the one you did (2).
      - cygx 8y ago
        As far as I'm aware, metals and fishing do not contribute to the Government Pension Fund of Norway, which is why I did not include them on the Norwegian side and similarly only looked at the top items on the Australian side (eg adding Refined Petrolium on the Autralian side would push the balance closer to 2 again). Point is, while Australia isn't quite as well off as Norway, there are resources aplenty to pull off something similar on a somewhat smaller scale.
Spooky23 8y ago
I think the broader point is that by nationalizing a shared resource, Norway achieved an outcome that benefits their entire society. They are fortunate that they are one of the few countries with functional government that could handle the oil wealth responsibly. If you compare it to the United States, we socialize many of the risks associated with oil production, refining and transport, and let the extractors, refiners, and transporters reap the benefits.
- cylinder 8y ago
  There's no shared resource. It requires risky exploration and investment in extraction. Do you really think the 25m Australians can afford to gamble on hundreds of billions on LNG terminals? One bad investment or a big drop and the whole country is bankrupt. Currently private sector and foreign business takes the risk. Then Australia gets a share of the profits through royalties and taxes as well as the labour income through employment of workers.
  - shawnz 8y ago
    > It requires risky exploration and investment in extraction. Which represents a tiny amount of value compared to the energy stored in the oil.
  - simonh 8y ago
    >Currently private sector and foreign business takes the risk. Australia provided mineral exploration incentives of $31m for 2018/19 at the tax payer’s expense, to mitigate that risk. https://www.financeminister.gov.au/media-release/2018/06/26/31-million-allocated-mining-exploration-incentive https://www.financeminister.gov.au/media-release/2018/06/26/...
bzbarsky 8y ago
The major form of mineral production in Australia is mining, not oil. Per http://www.worldstopexports.com/coal-exports-country/ http://www.worldstopexports.com/coal-exports-country/ in 2017 Australia exported $40.6 billion of coal, for a population of ~25 million. Per http://www.worldstopexports.com/iron-ore-exports-country/ http://www.worldstopexports.com/iron-ore-exports-country/ it also exported $49.3 billion of iron ore. Per http://www.worldstopexports.com/gold-exports-country/ http://www.worldstopexports.com/gold-exports-country/ it also exported $13.1 billion of gold. Just between those three items that works out to ~$4k per person for the year. Per http://www.worldstopexports.com/worlds-top-oil-exports-country/ http://www.worldstopexports.com/worlds-top-oil-exports-count... Norway exported $26 billion of oil, for a population of ~5 million. So about $5k per person for the year. Now both countries do other resource-extraction stuff too. Norway's natural gas exports are almost equal to their oil exports, as far as I can tell. Australia's annual exports of natural gas seem to be in the $40-$50 billion range depending on the year you look at (it's grown a lot recently). And Australia is doing a bunch of non-iron-ore and non-gold mining too (gems come to mind). Overall, per capita resource extraction revenue in Norway is certainly higher than in Australia, but it's not the "25x" higher than the oil numbers alone would indicate. Maybe 2x.
moorhosj 8y ago
Diamonds in Botswana, Copper in Chile, farmable land in the US, etc. The point is that Norway has managed it's natural advantages to the benefit all of their citizens compared to other countries whose resources primarily enrich individual companies/owners.
- sundvor 8y ago
  For this Norwegian expat, it's extremely hard to not see Australian politicians as corrupt - and inept, prioritising the wealth of the rich over that of the nation.
prawn 8y ago
An Australian's context here is that a minerals tax was proposed to build something remotely akin to the Norwegian fund, but was killed for political reasons. The key piece of the discussion for Australians is not the tax comparison or oil comparison that you've latched onto, but of a missed opportunity. Where the Norwegians could appreciate what the sovereign fund meant for them, the attempt in Australia was lambasted as another tax, copped serious lobbying by mining giants, etc.
- daemin 8y ago
  Granted it would have been nice to have a mining tax in collecting money for Australian social expenses. However if they would introduce such a tax now then it might encourage new mining developments and let them be sped through the environmental checks faster than they are now. So there is a danger we would have many more Adani like mines popped up. Though yet again maybe having a high enough mining tax would possible discourage such endeavours?

dalore 8y ago

As another fellow Aussie emigrant (not to Norway though), I believe they were not only talking about oil resources but all the other natural resources Australia is selling. My bet is Uranium is going to be an important one too in the future.

jessriedel 8y ago
Eye-balling the numbers, you'd pick up less than a factor of 5. I encourage you to look at the details and report back. You should also correct for the natural resources that Norway has the Australia lacks, like fish (almost 10% of Norway's exports inclusive of oil!).
- the_duke 8y ago
  Australia doesn't have ocean access and fishing industries?
  - jessriedel 8y ago
    Fish makes up just 0.13% of Australian exports https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/aus/ https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/aus/ Next time, consider looking the number up yourself and reporting back rather than just asking the question and so forcing me to look up the answer for you (or else look like I'm ignoring the issue).
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      Fish being a minor part of Australian exports is a claim with absolutely no relationship to whether or not Australia has fish. You claimed it didn't, and that is not credible.
      - jessriedel 8y ago
        In context, my claim was clearly that Australia did not have access to fishing resources that had economic effects that were remotely comparable to its total exports.
- barrkel 8y ago
  Energy is about 50% of Norway's exports, and minerals + energy is about 60% of Australia's exports. These are extractive industries that are structurally similar. Norway exports about $50 billion USD / year. Australia exports about $120 billion USD / year. This is probably why the Australian is comparing the situation with Norway. https://www.minister.industry.gov.au/ministers/frydenberg/speeches/mining-and-australian-economy-australian-governments-priorities-mining https://www.minister.industry.gov.au/ministers/frydenberg/sp... https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/production-and-exports/exports-of-oil-and-gas/ https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/production-and-exports/expo...
  - jessriedel 8y ago
    I'm aware that comparison he's trying to draw, but the comparison has to be fair. First, most obviously, Australia has almost 5 times the population of Norway! Second, if we're going to start increasing the scope of exports we're including, to make a fair comparison we should include minerals in Norway's total (not just Australia's), and we should really include other resources that Norway has that Australia doesn't (rather than just picking a category where Australia has larger exports). What are the numbers in this case? Again, I think this works out to a per capita endowment of that is still much, much larger for Norway, but you'd actually have to do a bit of work to check.
    - barrkel 8y ago
      Compare respective sovereign wealth funds: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2016/09/24/how-to-not-spend-it https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2016/09/24/h... IMO you're on a hiding to nothing trying to support your position that the comparison isn't valid. The economic export situation is structurally quite similar between Norway and Australia, and the difference in how they've handled it is vast, far greater than any multiple in population.
      - jessriedel 8y ago
        Huh? No one disputes that the countries handle things differently. But if you want to say that one way of handling things is better, and the only evidence you give are better outcomes, then inputs ought to be similar. But if one country has 30 times or 3 times the input (corresponding to oil or most natural resources, respectively), then this is a very poor comparison unless you do a lot more work to correct for it.
aplummer 8y ago
To OP really between coal and LNG alone dalore is making a fair comparison.
paulmd 8y ago
Uranium is actually quite common; it's cheap because it's an extremely controlled market (who are you going to sell it to?) with fairly limited demand (it doesn't take that much uranium to run a power plant or make a nuke, a cube about a meter per side can run a reactor for a year). Because it's so cheap, it's not substantially prospected so there is a good chance there are large reserves that can be exploited if we go looking for them. And, if it comes down to it, we can pull near-unlimited quantities from seawater at $200-1000 per kg (~10x current pricing). The costs of nuclear power generation are almost entirely capital costs and insurance, the fuel costs are practically a rounding error, so this does not substantially change the costs of nuclear power generation. https://www.newsdeeply.com/oceans/articles/2018/06/28/the-nuclear-option-technology-to-extract-uranium-from-the-sea-advances https://www.newsdeeply.com/oceans/articles/2018/06/28/the-nu... So, uranium will probably never be super valuable. Strategically important, and nice to have in a conveniently accessible form, but not economically valuable.

NullPrefix 8y ago

>313,661 barrels per day per million people.... Australia produces 12,010 bbl/day/millon-people Would be way easier to understand the comparison if the notation would be the same on both numbers. I assume bbl means billions of barrels, this means Australia's number is higher by few orders.

vijayr02 8y ago
bbl is market jargon for barrels, not billions of barrels...
- NullPrefix 8y ago
  So why not use the same for both numbers?
- jessaustin 8y ago
  That's goofy, most abbreviations drop letters rather than adding them.
aristophenes 8y ago
They are the same notation, look it up. If Australia was producing 12,010 billion barrels of oil per day per million people you'd probably be able to see that portion of the globe turn black from space, everyone in Australia would have drowned in it and an oil tsunami would be heading towards New Zealand.

cygx 8y ago

Australia produces 12,010 bbl/day/millon-people You should not look at just oil, but natural resources in general (in case of Australia, iron, coal and gold in particular). Norway still comes out on top, but only by a factor of ~2 (cf https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/nor/ https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/nor/ https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/aus/ https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/aus/ ).

jessriedel 8y ago
I did, which is already reported further down in this thread, and my eyeball estimate was the Norway exceeded Australia per capita by more than a factor of 4. Happy to see more accurate numbers.
- cygx 8y ago
  Sure. We're looking for something that's equivalent to Norway's oil industry. According to the links I gave, Norway's top exports are Crude Petrolium and Petrolium Gas, in 2017 accounting for 53% of all exports at $55.8B. Assuming a population of 5.3M, this translates to $10.5k per person. Australia's top exports are also based on natural resources, namely, Iron Ore, Coal Briquettes, Gold and Petroleum Gas, accounting for 60% of all exports at $144.6B. Assuming a population of 24.6M, this translates to $5.9k per person.
  - jessriedel 8y ago
    Thanks. As discussed further down the thread, it is disingenuous to add natural resources to Australia's total but not Norway's total. (Metals and fishing are both 10% each of Norways exports.) This makes it 15.5k per person in Norway, giving a ratio of 3, halfway between the ratio I eyeballed (4) and the one you did (2).
    - cygx 8y ago
      As far as I'm aware, metals and fishing do not contribute to the Government Pension Fund of Norway, which is why I did not include them on the Norwegian side and similarly only looked at the top items on the Australian side (eg adding Refined Petrolium on the Autralian side would push the balance closer to 2 again). Point is, while Australia isn't quite as well off as Norway, there are resources aplenty to pull off something similar on a somewhat smaller scale.

Spooky23 8y ago

I think the broader point is that by nationalizing a shared resource, Norway achieved an outcome that benefits their entire society. They are fortunate that they are one of the few countries with functional government that could handle the oil wealth responsibly. If you compare it to the United States, we socialize many of the risks associated with oil production, refining and transport, and let the extractors, refiners, and transporters reap the benefits.

cylinder 8y ago
There's no shared resource. It requires risky exploration and investment in extraction. Do you really think the 25m Australians can afford to gamble on hundreds of billions on LNG terminals? One bad investment or a big drop and the whole country is bankrupt. Currently private sector and foreign business takes the risk. Then Australia gets a share of the profits through royalties and taxes as well as the labour income through employment of workers.
- shawnz 8y ago
  > It requires risky exploration and investment in extraction. Which represents a tiny amount of value compared to the energy stored in the oil.
- simonh 8y ago
  >Currently private sector and foreign business takes the risk. Australia provided mineral exploration incentives of $31m for 2018/19 at the tax payer’s expense, to mitigate that risk. https://www.financeminister.gov.au/media-release/2018/06/26/31-million-allocated-mining-exploration-incentive https://www.financeminister.gov.au/media-release/2018/06/26/...

bzbarsky 8y ago

The major form of mineral production in Australia is mining, not oil. Per http://www.worldstopexports.com/coal-exports-country/ http://www.worldstopexports.com/coal-exports-country/ in 2017 Australia exported $40.6 billion of coal, for a population of ~25 million. Per http://www.worldstopexports.com/iron-ore-exports-country/ http://www.worldstopexports.com/iron-ore-exports-country/ it also exported $49.3 billion of iron ore. Per http://www.worldstopexports.com/gold-exports-country/ http://www.worldstopexports.com/gold-exports-country/ it also exported $13.1 billion of gold. Just between those three items that works out to ~$4k per person for the year. Per http://www.worldstopexports.com/worlds-top-oil-exports-country/ http://www.worldstopexports.com/worlds-top-oil-exports-count... Norway exported $26 billion of oil, for a population of ~5 million. So about $5k per person for the year. Now both countries do other resource-extraction stuff too. Norway's natural gas exports are almost equal to their oil exports, as far as I can tell. Australia's annual exports of natural gas seem to be in the $40-$50 billion range depending on the year you look at (it's grown a lot recently). And Australia is doing a bunch of non-iron-ore and non-gold mining too (gems come to mind). Overall, per capita resource extraction revenue in Norway is certainly higher than in Australia, but it's not the "25x" higher than the oil numbers alone would indicate. Maybe 2x.

moorhosj 8y ago

Diamonds in Botswana, Copper in Chile, farmable land in the US, etc. The point is that Norway has managed it's natural advantages to the benefit all of their citizens compared to other countries whose resources primarily enrich individual companies/owners.

sundvor 8y ago
For this Norwegian expat, it's extremely hard to not see Australian politicians as corrupt - and inept, prioritising the wealth of the rich over that of the nation.

prawn 8y ago

An Australian's context here is that a minerals tax was proposed to build something remotely akin to the Norwegian fund, but was killed for political reasons. The key piece of the discussion for Australians is not the tax comparison or oil comparison that you've latched onto, but of a missed opportunity. Where the Norwegians could appreciate what the sovereign fund meant for them, the attempt in Australia was lambasted as another tax, copped serious lobbying by mining giants, etc.

daemin 8y ago
Granted it would have been nice to have a mining tax in collecting money for Australian social expenses. However if they would introduce such a tax now then it might encourage new mining developments and let them be sped through the environmental checks faster than they are now. So there is a danger we would have many more Adani like mines popped up. Though yet again maybe having a high enough mining tax would possible discourage such endeavours?