Kuwait with polar bears
Josh Kucera has been blogging this week from newly self-governing Greenland and shares a mind-blowing statistic: Greenland’s government, using US Geological Survey data among others, says that the mean estimates for its oil reserves is about 50 billion barrels. That number is a bit abstract, so I did some math: The island has about 56,000 ...
Josh Kucera has been blogging this week from newly self-governing Greenland and shares a mind-blowing statistic:
Josh Kucera has been blogging this week from newly self-governing Greenland and shares a mind-blowing statistic:
Greenland’s government, using US Geological Survey data among others, says that the mean estimates for its oil reserves is about 50 billion barrels. That number is a bit abstract, so I did some math: The island has about 56,000 people, and if things go as they appear to be going, it will be an independent country some time in the next couple of decades. That means each Greenlander will own about 900,000 barrels of oil.
Compare that to some other oil powers. These are the top three countries in terms of oil reserves per capita:
Kuwait: 39,900 barrels per person
UAE: 37,576 barrels per person
Qatar: 18,071 barrels per personYes, Greenland could have 50 times more oil per capita than Kuwait.
There’s more.
Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating
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