Ian Verrender

So we don't have a lot there.

Now there's another category of oil reserves called contingent.

And we've got about 2.2 billion barrels there.

But this is stuff that is really not economic to basically extract.

It's cost too much to get it out of the ground.

Now, look, prices have risen dramatically in the last little while.

And that means that some of those might actually be economic now.

But even if we got all of that out of the ground and combined it with the proven and probable and then we stopped importing any fuel at all, if we had the refineries to be able to do it, we'd have enough for about nine years.

We do have shale deposits where you can extract oil and other petrochemicals.

But look, I'm not up to speed.

None of them have ever been developed.

And Geoscience Australia makes that point that while it technically exists, none of them are developed and they're not considered to be contingent assets because they're not, I guess, traditional forms of oil.

It's this

non-conventional oil that's there but i mean you could do it but you get down to the point well how much is this going to cost you to do it now in america it's quite an interesting phenomenon really the whole shale gas and shale oil thing it's more expensive there than you know traditional wells that they drill oil for um but what normally happens is when oil prices go up the

a lot of those shale deposits actually become quite economic and all the infrastructure is there to actually extract the oil.

And so they kick into gear and then you get a big increase in supply and then suddenly prices drop and then they drop.

So it's almost like the- They've become the swing producer for the world.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

But I mean, you know, the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America, it's still the major, you know, oil production area in the US.