Feb 242010
Britain is looking to the North Sea to provide around 1/3 of its power needs until 2020. Sounds great, but in the grand scheme of things 1/3 is a small number and a decade is a short period of time:
In recent months the industry has identified up to 11bn barrels of oil and gas in new and existing projects, a sharp rise on previously years. It takes UK offshore reserves close to 25bn. But the cost of extracting the newly identified deposits, many of them located in deep water in the central North Sea or to the west of Shetland, is estimated at £60bn. Production costs at new sites is estimated to be on average 20% higher than for existing projects.
