4 ms·

Call it environmentalism if you like, but there is a strategic advantage to leaving more of it in the ground, ready to be pulled up later on as the need arises.

Call it environmentalism if you like, but there is a strategic advantage to leaving more of it in the ground, ready to be pulled up later on as the need arises. Norway doesn't need the money from additional drilling right now. They might need the money later. Or NATO may need the oil directly later...

happytiger 3y ago
My first thought was your last statement. Absolutely spot on Also, oil is pretty good at powering engines but utterly essential for making things. Rotating machinery, linear machinery, turbine oil for wind farms, dielectric oil used in transformers and other HV electronics, cooling oil, cutting oil, gearboxes, almost all plastics, and hydraulics are all essentially oil based processes. The reason machinery can run for any significant length of time? It’s almost always oil. If it moves, it likely has oil in it. People really only think of it as a fuel for vehicles, but it is so very, very much more important for its other roles. As potent as it is for a fuel, we should be focused on not burning it as it’s essential for civilization in ways people do not broadly realize yet.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Burning it in search of its replacements is a decent idea as well, though.
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    We know the replacements for oil for energy, especially electrical demand, we're just unwilling to go through the social changes and costs to get there quickly. The US and Europe could have been on an entirely nuclear and renewable energy mix for electricity a decade ago if the social will had been there to force it but there's a lot of money in the existing industries to lobby against that.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      Well, there's a lot of lobbying from Greenpeace that's set nuclear back a few decades. It's not just industry.
      - rtkwe 3y ago
        Industry is the real money behind it though. The waste disposal issue in the US because we don't reprocess our spent fuel was a legitimate issue but it was over reacted too along with big scares like Chernobyl and TMI. Singular events like that stick out a lot more than the slow poisoning from coal and gas plants but that's just a fact of human psychology and the difficultly of definitively attributing deaths to slow environmental poisons like that.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        It might be the real money (who knows), but I think public and political sentiment was massively swayed by Greenpeace.
    - soco 3y ago
      On the other hand, even here and even today people argue "if we don't do it someone else will" to resist switching from oil to anything else. So I wouldn't blame it on the industrial lobby, or at least not entirely. The status quo is a powerful argument.
  - happytiger 3y ago
    Isn’t that the plot of Waterworld?
- dandy23 3y ago
  But the quantities needed for the rest of the applications are so much smaller.
  - happytiger 3y ago
    It’s about 25% of every barrel we pull out of the ground. It’s not insignificant.
    - dandy23 3y ago
      Then we could avoid the worst sources such as tar sands, fracking, arctic deep sea etc.
marcusverus 3y ago
Ignoring oil reserves would be a silly way of storing value, as it is an asset that requires years of work to access and is thus is extremely illiquid. Even then, once production wells are completed, the value trickles out slowly over time, limiting its usefulness. If you actually want a strategic store of value, you would pump the oil, sell it, and store the proceeds in liquid assets, where the sum total of the value extracted is available instantly. Further, there is no shortage of oil reserves globally, so the "save it for later" argument makes little sense.
- gpderetta 3y ago
  I think the parent meant that in case of war you can't fuel your tanks with money.
  - sapiogram 3y ago
    I'm not sure how important the difference is in practice, offshore oil drilling sounds like something that can be easily disrupted during a war.
  - marcusverus 3y ago
    Whereas you can fuel your tanks with unrefined oil that's half a mile under the ground?
sapiogram 3y ago
In terms of military strategy, your argument might make sense, but it's unsound from a purely economic perspective. Norway's solution is far better: Drill the oil now, export it, and invest the money abroad. From the perspective of the domestic economy, the result is mostly the same, but now the money multiplies abroad, and is far more easily available when it's needed.
doktrin 3y ago
If so that would be an unintended side effect. This was an ideologically driven activist ruling that the majority of the population is opposed to, and which is being appealed by the government.

happytiger 3y ago

My first thought was your last statement. Absolutely spot on Also, oil is pretty good at powering engines but utterly essential for making things. Rotating machinery, linear machinery, turbine oil for wind farms, dielectric oil used in transformers and other HV electronics, cooling oil, cutting oil, gearboxes, almost all plastics, and hydraulics are all essentially oil based processes. The reason machinery can run for any significant length of time? It’s almost always oil. If it moves, it likely has oil in it. People really only think of it as a fuel for vehicles, but it is so very, very much more important for its other roles. As potent as it is for a fuel, we should be focused on not burning it as it’s essential for civilization in ways people do not broadly realize yet.

robertlagrant 3y ago
Burning it in search of its replacements is a decent idea as well, though.
- rtkwe 3y ago
  We know the replacements for oil for energy, especially electrical demand, we're just unwilling to go through the social changes and costs to get there quickly. The US and Europe could have been on an entirely nuclear and renewable energy mix for electricity a decade ago if the social will had been there to force it but there's a lot of money in the existing industries to lobby against that.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Well, there's a lot of lobbying from Greenpeace that's set nuclear back a few decades. It's not just industry.
    - rtkwe 3y ago
      Industry is the real money behind it though. The waste disposal issue in the US because we don't reprocess our spent fuel was a legitimate issue but it was over reacted too along with big scares like Chernobyl and TMI. Singular events like that stick out a lot more than the slow poisoning from coal and gas plants but that's just a fact of human psychology and the difficultly of definitively attributing deaths to slow environmental poisons like that.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        It might be the real money (who knows), but I think public and political sentiment was massively swayed by Greenpeace.
  - soco 3y ago
    On the other hand, even here and even today people argue "if we don't do it someone else will" to resist switching from oil to anything else. So I wouldn't blame it on the industrial lobby, or at least not entirely. The status quo is a powerful argument.
- happytiger 3y ago
  Isn’t that the plot of Waterworld?
dandy23 3y ago
But the quantities needed for the rest of the applications are so much smaller.
- happytiger 3y ago
  It’s about 25% of every barrel we pull out of the ground. It’s not insignificant.
  - dandy23 3y ago
    Then we could avoid the worst sources such as tar sands, fracking, arctic deep sea etc.

marcusverus 3y ago

Ignoring oil reserves would be a silly way of storing value, as it is an asset that requires years of work to access and is thus is extremely illiquid. Even then, once production wells are completed, the value trickles out slowly over time, limiting its usefulness. If you actually want a strategic store of value, you would pump the oil, sell it, and store the proceeds in liquid assets, where the sum total of the value extracted is available instantly. Further, there is no shortage of oil reserves globally, so the "save it for later" argument makes little sense.

gpderetta 3y ago
I think the parent meant that in case of war you can't fuel your tanks with money.
- sapiogram 3y ago
  I'm not sure how important the difference is in practice, offshore oil drilling sounds like something that can be easily disrupted during a war.
- marcusverus 3y ago
  Whereas you can fuel your tanks with unrefined oil that's half a mile under the ground?

sapiogram 3y ago

In terms of military strategy, your argument might make sense, but it's unsound from a purely economic perspective. Norway's solution is far better: Drill the oil now, export it, and invest the money abroad. From the perspective of the domestic economy, the result is mostly the same, but now the money multiplies abroad, and is far more easily available when it's needed.

doktrin 3y ago

If so that would be an unintended side effect. This was an ideologically driven activist ruling that the majority of the population is opposed to, and which is being appealed by the government.