Au contraire, my Iraqi friend; With 310 billion barrels of oil, Canada has the world's second largest reserve.

Iraq is pumping oil at a better pace than they were in '90, before the whole Iraq-Kuwait-American mess started.
Halliburton et al. have refurbished and modernized Iraq's oil infrastructure, (something Saddam Hussein didn't bother to do, he barely even did maintenance on his country's lifeblood industry), so Iraq will actually be better off economically in ten years, than they would have been if Hussein had never crossed swords with the US and UK.

Michael

This is the definition of proven reserves.

"the estimated quantities of oil which geological and engineering data demonstrate with reasonable certainty to be recoverable in future years from known reservoirs under current economic and operating conditions."

This is the definition of non-conventional reserves.

"This includes oil from coal, oil shale, oil sands, tar sands, bitumen, heavy and extra heavy oil, deep water oil, polar oil, and natural gas condensates"

h-man:

Canada's not running some kind of pilot programme.

They produce around 3 million barrels of oil per day, including about a million barrels a day from tar sands, and supply 16% of the oil that the US imports.

I'm guessing that OPEC isn't counting Canada's reserves as 10 billion barrels.

Michael

Actually I AGREE with you, but according to Oil and Gas Journal they don't meet the definition of proven reserves. (its screwier than that because Oil and Gas Journal sometimes does include the Tar Sands) Nuff said on my part, but apparently the above post is using a different definition than you or I are.

> How could Dick Cheney let this happen...

Better dump him from the ticket then!

Well, isn't this interesting!?

I expect that pretty soon the new Iraq government is going to start asking sharp questions about the Oil-For-Palaces&Bribes program that the former government ran.

And I somehow suspect that they have an information pipeline coming from the US, to provide them with all sorts of, um, interesting tidbits to weave into their questions.

He he

Just pick up the latest National Geographic. It's article, the End of Cheap Oil, has all countrie's proven and theoretical reserves. Canada's proven reserves is very tiny.

Chris:

From the NATIONAL CENTER FOR POLICY ANALYSIS:

In May 1920, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that the world’s total endowment of oil amounted to 60 billion barrels.

In 1950, geologists estimated the world’s total oil endowment at around 600 billion barrels.

From 1970 through 1990, their estimates increased to between 1,500 and 2,000 billion barrels.

In 1994, the U.S. Geological Survey raised the estimate to 2,400 billion barrels, and their most recent estimate (2000) was of a 3,000-billion-barrel endowment.

By the year 2000, a total of 900 billion barrels of oil had been produced. Total world oil production in 2000 was 25 billion barrels. If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world’s oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056.

Oil production from tar sands in Canada and South America would add about 600 billion barrels to the world’s supply.
Rocks found in the three western states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone contain 1,500 billion barrels of oil.
Worldwide, the oil-shale resource base could easily be as large as 14,000 billion barrels — more than 500 years of oil supply at year 2000 production rates.

Unconventional oil resources are more expensive to extract and produce, but we can expect production costs to drop with time as improved technologies increase efficiency.

With every passing year it becomes possible to exploit oil resources that could not have been recovered with old technologies. The first American oil well drilled in 1859 by Colonel Edwin Drake in Titusville, Pa. reached a total depth of 69 feet (21 meters).

Today’s drilling technology allows the completion of wells up to 30,000 feet (9,144 meters) deep.
The vast petroleum resources of the world’s submerged continental margins are accessible from offshore platforms that allow drilling in water depths to 9,000 feet (2,743 meters).
The amount of oil recoverable from a single well has greatly increased because new technologies allow the boring of multiple horizontal shafts from a single vertical shaft.
Four-dimensional seismic imaging enables engineers and geologists to see a subsurface petroleum reservoir drain over months to years, allowing them to increase the efficiency of its recovery.
New techniques and new technology have increased the efficiency of oil exploration. The success rate for exploratory petroleum wells has increased 50 percent over the past decade, according to energy economist Michael C. Lynch.

From the Alberta gov't:

Oil sands currently represent [...] about one-third of all the oil produced in Canada. By 2005, oil sands production is expected to represent 50 per cent of Canada's total crude oil output, and 10 per cent of North American production.
In 2003, 883,000 barrels of oil were produced every day from Canada's oil sands.

From the March '03 'Geotimes':

New stature for Canadian oil sands

Estimates of Canada’s oil reserves jumped from 4.9 billion barrels to 180 billion this year, making the country the second-largest oil reserve in the world, according to an annual survey conducted by the Oil and Gas Journal. The change catapults Canada ahead of Iraq in terms of reserve size, and decreases OPEC’s share of the world’s oil reserves by more than 10 percent.

In other words, that 'National Geographic' article is probably some procrastinating and deadline desperate writer's rehash of an article from the 70s.

It clearly isn't the product of anyone who spent ten minutes doing some basic research.

Pretty soon the new Iraqi government is going to be wanting a lot of cash of their own instead of depending on US aid. So they're going to start sellinng a lot of oil, and not really care if they send the world oil price down.

Either the Saudis drop their production to keep the price up, and then they have less money to spend on Al-Qaeda and Wahhabist missionaries, or else they keep their production up too, world oil prices drop, and the world and (and US) economy booms.

Good for us either way!