Oil has been trading around forty dollars per barrel in recent weeks. The presumption among many is that oil producers must be losing tons of money with prices so low. Some are, some aren’t. As reported by CNNMoney, in the UK, it costs more than fifty two dollars to produce a barrel of oil. In Brazil, it costs nearly forty nine dollars. In Canada, it costs around forty one dollars a barrel, which has been just about break even.
America is more efficient in producing oil than all of these nations. Production costs average thirty six dollars a barrel, below the recent trading price. All of these findings come from Rystad Energy’s UCube database, which encompasses information from approximately sixty-five thousand oil and gas fields around the world. While America’s oil fields are productive, there are places where the cost of producing oil is even cheaper.
Producers in both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait can pump a barrel of oil for less than ten dollars, and the Iraqis can produce oil for about eleven dollars a barrel. Oil prices plunged during the latter half of last year. The drop came after OPEC, which includes some of the largest oil producing countries in the world, decided to continue supplying large amounts of oil, perhaps to drive high cost producers out of the market.
