Hacker News Reader

Comment by cygx | Hacker News Reader

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/aus/ ).

View on HN

It's not the yield, but the profit.

Statoil makes huge margins on their oil because once the tricky rig was set up, it just comes out like Gold.

Most other natural resources have much thinner margins due to processing, overhead.

'Sweet Crude' i.e. the kind you get in the desert, and 'sweet once it's setup to be' i.e. Statoil ... this is a different thing together from other natural resources.

Norway is like Kuwait, it's almost impossible to compare it to anything else.

They can leave the Oil in the ground for now because they are very rich and have more money than they know what to do with.

You know what also comes out like gold? Actual gold :p

As far as I'm aware, profit margins on iron aren't too shabby either, though I'd have to do some digging how this all shapes up in these specific cases (Norwegian oil vs Australian gold, iron and coal).

The difference is not just profit margins, but very different capex and opex. Capex on oil rigs is large (especially offshore), but opex is pretty reasonable. I would imagine iron mining has much higher opex. A better approach it may be to loot at the graphs of average fixed/variable/total cost, which are very different.

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.

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.

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).

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.

That may be your point, which is fine, but the original comment I was replying to was comparing the tax rate of Norway and Australia, and I was arguing this is not a sensible comparison in light of the much larger natural resource inheritance of Norway.

I think the original comment only really mentioned taxes in passing and then the discussion went off down a rabbit hole; but a wonderful rabbit hole in which each subsequent comment added more interesting and relevant information.

Fishing, unless you feel that the fisheries are being overfished, is in quit a different bucket because it's a renewable resource.

Metals is an interesting case because on the one hand they are definitely a non-renewable resource. On the other hand, it seems like there's a difference between exporting ore and exporting refined metals, in terms of whether it's "just" resource extraction or not...

you also have to look at extraction costs - Statoil is very high yield and low cost extraction which survives even the tightest OPEC squeezes.

Iron ore extraction isn't bad but it's nowhere near as profitable as Norway's oil extraction

You'd have to do that across the entire range of resources and then divide per capita - on that basis I think Norway would blow by 4x Australia just based on off-the-top of my head estimate

Add lithium to that list.

Australia exports (perhaps much) less than $1B/year of Lithium, so that's way smaller than the rounding error of this discussion.

The quantity is not a rounding error, whereas the value is low only because the Australian government prices lithium far below its value.

Sure can't deviate from its modus operandi; it's not Norway, after all.

And by that I mean that Australia favours enriching corporate coffers over collection revenue from its natural resources so as to benefit the whole nation with a long term view.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com