Recently, several firms have begun test drilling in areas off the Falkland Islands.
The Falklands sit in one of the most stormy seas in the world, and gales are common. I have read that there may be as much as 90 billion barrels of oil there-but how much will it cost to extract?
Will drill rigs be able to stay there through the Antarctic winters?
If the area turns out to ahve appreciable petroleum deposits, how long will it take for the field to begin production?
I have heard that Argentina would like to share in the bounty-what is their claim to the oil?
Absolutely no legitimate claim whatsoever.
Oil companies have had plenty of experience of such weather in the North Sea.
The main problems are likely to be logistical and financial. The Falklands are a long way from anywhere else. There are no existing facilities for drilling. No storage facilities, no refining capability. I’ll bet there’s not even a McDonalds for thousands of miles. And then there’s the problem of what to do with the oil once you find it. It’s going to be very expensive to transport it the nearest market (US or Europe).
There’s no South American market? Surely there are refineries in Argentina or barring that Uruguay or Southern Brazil
(not so sure how populated southern Chile is.)
There are political issues with Argentina. But there’s plenty of land in the Falklands.
That’s why I said “or barring that”. I’m sure that there is a better chance of argentinians not wanting to purchase or refine falkland oil out of spite despite the fact that oil is fungible and they can buy from another source. But who knows if they’d get over that by the time the oil field comes on line.
Probably no more expensive than transporting oil from, say, Saudi Arabia to the US or Europe.
There’s no port in the Falklands that could take large commercial tankers. You could get around this by building a deewater anchorage. If you do this, then you need tankers that are capable of a South Atlantic storm. Talking of storms, has anyone here got any idea just how awful the weather is down there? There’s three or four months of the year when it would be almost impossible to transfer any oil at all to a ship.
They don’t have these sort of problems in Saudi.
This is not a problem. There are tankers and supertankers that regularly round the Cape.